Leisure-Time Activities (Continued)
Musical comedy became a popular form of entertainment in urban areas. Family vaudeville shows consisted of a variety of performances including dancers, jugglers, comedians, musicians, and magicians. Edison invented motion picture technology in the 1880s, and by the early 1900s, people could enjoy short movie pictures. The Nickelodeon was a small theater that showed a series of short films each day. People paid five cents to watch the films.
 Family vaudeville show |
New York’s Coney Island also opened in the early 1900s. People visited Coney Island to enjoy the rides and attractions. Resort hotels began to spring up along the beaches on the East Coast and people left the cities to spend weekend days at the beach.
Newspapers, magazines, and fictional novels also became a popular form of entertainment in the late 1800s. Newspapers were generally informative, but sensational journalism became popular to sell papers. Publishers, including William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, competed to circulate more papers, and the term “yellow journalism” was given to the sensational style of writing used to excite the reader. Magazines, such as Cosmopolitan, became popular and authors including Mark Twain, L. Frank Baum, and O. Henry wrote regional novels that depicted characters that were familiar to readers.