With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830 is a sweeping interpretative history of American popular culture. Providing deep insights into various individuals, events, and movements, LeRoy Ashby explores the development and influence of popular culture—from minstrel shows to hip-hop, from the penny press to pulp magazines, from the NBA to NASCAR, and much in between.
By placing the evolution of popular amusement in historical context, Ashby illuminates the complex ways in which popular culture both reflects and transforms American society. He demonstrates a recurring pattern in democratic culture by showing how groups and individuals on the cultural and social periphery have profoundly altered the nature of mainstream entertainment. The mainstream has repeatedly co-opted and sanitized marginal trends in a process that continues to shift the limits of acceptability. Ashby describes how social control and notions of public morality often vie with the bold, erotic, and sensational as entrepreneurs finesse the vagaries of the market and shape public appetites.
Ashby argues that popular culture is indeed a democratic art, as it entertains the masses, provides opportunities for powerless and disadvantaged individuals to succeed, and responds to changing public hopes, fears, and desires. However, it has also served to reinforce prejudices, leading to discrimination and violence. Accordingly, the study of popular culture reveals the often dubious contours of the American dream.
With Amusement for All never loses sight of pop culture’s primary goal: the buying and selling of fun. Ironically, although popular culture has drawn an enormous variety of amusements from grassroots origins, the biggest winners are most often sprawling corporations with little connection to a movement’s original innovators.
Reviews
"Given all the amusements discussed in this book, one wonders how Americans ever have time for work. This fascinating exploration is more than a listing, though, as it relates the importance of amusement to cultural change... This book is more than amusing; it is instructive." --
USA Today "He draws on the substantial volume of historical scholarship on American popular culture produced since the 1970s to present a survey of impressive breadth on two centuries of American amusement...The book is well-written and the narrative flows along effortlessly." --
Journal of American History 
