Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity by Lauren Rabinovitz (review)

Lauren Rabinovitz traces the coevolution of American cinema and amusement parks, posing provocative new questions about subjectivity and spectatorship at the turn of the twentieth century. She begins by framing these forms of entertainment as national phenomena that cannot be reduced to a single case study: “By 1910 every municipality with a population of more than twenty thousand had both amusement parks and motion picture theaters” (8).