Electric Dreamland innovatively analyzes the early twentieth-century's twin technological entertainments: amusement parks and motion pictures. It demonstrates how crucial railroads and electricity were to both and how their inextricable development erased conventional notions of urban and rural difference. Amusement parks and motion pictures, Lauren Rabonovitz argues, served as unique venues of mass culture for people to adapt to modernity by experiencing its pleasures and dangers first hand and to share in the emergence of a new American national identity.
Richard Abel, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Electric Dreamland is a work of meticulous scholarship and original argument that deepens our knowledge and provokes new insights. Scholars of American popular culture are in Rabinovitz's debt.
John F. Kasson, author of Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century Electric Dreamland is part of a growing body of work that builds an inter-medial reading of cinema's relationship to other early-twentieth-century phenomena. It draws on a wealth of archival materials, ephemera, and experiential data to demonstrate the remarkable inter-dependence of amusement parks and early motion pictures. Never again will the two entertainments be seen in isolation.
Shelley Stamp, author of Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon ...accessible, but no less rigorous in its scholarship.
Patrick Friel AfterImage An excellent pick for any collection strong in entertainment and social analysis.Midwest Book Review Midwest Book Review thought-provoking, theoretically savvy, and sometimes even amusing study...highly recommended. Choice