Show business is today so essential to American culture it's hard to imagine a time when it was marginal. But as David Monod demonstrates, the appetite for amusements outside the home developed slowly over the course of the nineteenth century. The Soul of Pleasure offers a new interpretation of how the taste for entertainment was cultivated.
David Monod is Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is the author of Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945?53 and Store Wars: Shopkeepers and the Culture of Mass Marketing, 1890?39.
