5.9 Popular Culture, The Penny Press & Mass Entertainment (1830–1860)

Why Popular Culture Is on the Exam

CLEP's cultural and intellectual category carries 20% of the questions, and the blueprint theme reads "major movements and individual figures in the history of American literature, art and popular culture." Transcendentalism and the Hudson River School are covered elsewhere in this guide. This section covers what ordinary Americans actually read, watched, and sang — and why it mattered politically.

The Preconditions

Three changes made mass culture possible:

1. Literacy. White literacy in the North exceeded 90% by 1850, among the highest rates in the world, driven by common schools and Protestant Bible reading. In the South, literacy was lower and teaching enslaved people to read was criminal in most states.
2. Printing technology. The steam-powered cylinder press (adopted in America in the 1830s) and cheap machine-made paper cut the cost of a printed sheet dramatically. Stereotyping allowed reprinting without resetting type.
3. Urban density and transport. Cities concentrated audiences within walking distance of a theater or newsstand, and canals and railroads distributed printed matter nationally. Congress subsidized this directly: newspapers traveled through the mails at token rates.

The Penny Press

Before 1833, an American newspaper cost six cents, was sold by annual subscription of $8–$10 — roughly a week's wages for a laborer — and served merchants and party politicians. Papers were openly partisan and carried shipping news and political essays.

Benjamin Day launched the New York Sun in 1833 at one cent, sold on the street by newsboys. The business model was the innovation: revenue came from advertising and volume, not subscriptions, which meant the paper had to attract the largest possible audience rather than the richest. Content changed accordingly — police-court reports, crime, human interest, scandal, and sensation.

• James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald (1835) added financial reporting, the first Wall Street coverage, foreign correspondents, and aggressive coverage of the sensational Helen Jewett murder in 1836.
• Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune (1841) was cheap but earnest, campaigning for temperance, western settlement, and eventually free soil; its weekly edition reached a national rural readership and made Greeley one of the most influential men in America.
• The Sun's "Great Moon Hoax" (1835), a fabricated series describing bat-winged creatures on the moon, multiplied circulation and demonstrated how little the new journalism cared about verification.
• The Associated Press (1846) was formed by New York papers to share telegraphic news costs, and the telegraph's per-word expense pushed reporting toward the terse, factual style that became standard.

The political consequence was large: by the 1850s a mass, cheap, national press could make sectional crises — Bleeding Kansas, the caning of Charles Sumner, Harpers Ferry — into shared, immediate, emotionally charged national events.

The Theater and Blackface Minstrelsy

Theater was genuinely popular entertainment, not an elite pastime. Shakespeare was performed constantly and audiences knew the plays well enough to shout corrections. Working-class galleries expected to participate loudly.

Blackface minstrelsy was the dominant American entertainment form from the 1840s through the Civil War.

• Thomas D. Rice developed the "Jump Jim Crow" song-and-dance act around 1830.
• The Virginia Minstrels staged the first full-length minstrel show in 1843; Christy's Minstrels standardized its three-part structure.
• Stephen Foster wrote for the minstrel stage ("Oh! Susanna," 1848; "Camptown Races," 1850) and became the first American to earn a living as a songwriter.

Its content was white performers in burnt-cork makeup enacting caricatures — the plantation "Jim Crow" and the northern urban dandy "Zip Coon" — that portrayed Black Americans as childlike, comic, and content in slavery. Historians read minstrelsy as doing two jobs at once: it let northern white working men mock the pretensions of their betters through a Black mask, while circulating racist imagery nationwide that hardened the assumptions on which slavery and later segregation rested. The name "Jim Crow," attached to segregation laws, comes directly from Rice's act.

The Astor Place Riot (May 1849) shows how charged theatergoing was. A rivalry between the American actor Edwin Forrest and the English William Charles Macready ignited a crowd of working-class New Yorkers; the militia fired, and more than twenty people died. The quarrel was ostensibly about Shakespeare and actually about class and anti-English feeling.

Reading for the Millions

Uncle Tom's Cabin is the crossover case worth remembering: it sold roughly 300,000 copies in its first year and over a million in Britain, was adapted into countless unauthorized stage versions, and demonstrates that the most consequential political intervention of the decade arrived as popular entertainment.

Self-Improvement and Spectacle

• The lyceum movement, begun by Josiah Holbrook in 1826, organized adult lecture societies in thousands of towns. Emerson delivered well over a thousand lectures on the circuit; Frederick Douglass, Horace Mann, and scientific popularizers used the same platform. It was mass education and mass entertainment at once.
• P. T. Barnum opened the American Museum in New York in 1841, mixing genuine natural-history specimens with frauds like the "Feejee Mermaid" and exhibiting the performer Charles Stratton as "General Tom Thumb." His Jenny Lind tour (1850) sold out halls nationwide through advance publicity for a singer few Americans had heard. Barnum invented modern promotion — and his museum's exhibition of human beings as curiosities belongs in any honest account of the era's racial culture.
• Nathaniel Currier's lithography firm, founded in the 1830s and renamed Currier & Ives in 1857, sold inexpensive lithographs of clipper ships, winter scenes, and political events into ordinary parlors, making them the closest thing to a national visual culture.
• Organized sport began to appear: the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club codified rules in 1845, horse racing drew enormous crowds, and prizefighting flourished despite being illegal nearly everywhere.