The Iowa State Fair
by Kurt Ullrich
University of Iowa Press, 2014
Every year in early August, a breeze borne by silent messengers from another time blows through Iowa. It carries a whiff of something wonderful, something far off and a bit unclear, yet oddly familiar. It's a reminder that an extraordinary annual event is about to take place, just as it has for more than 150 years: the Iowa State Fair.

In 2013, Kurt Ullrich set out to chronicle the magic of the Iowa State Fair in words and photographs. Join him as August days and nights blow warm and easy over the fairgrounds, brushing lightly against fellow travelers on this earth, both human and not. He captures precious moments of extreme joy and unbridled delight in these beautiful black-and-white images, celebrating the brash rural energy of the fair, from Big Wheel races to people-watching goats, fair queen contestants to arm wrestlers, Percherons to ponies. Prize pigs, prize sheep, prize apples, and the famous butter cow all have their moment in the limelight. Iowa’s very best ear of corn and old friends reminiscing outside their RVs draw the photographer’s fond eye, as do brightly lit beer stands and the brilliant arc of the Ferris wheel against the night sky.

If you always go to the Iowa State Fair, this book is for you. If you’ve never been, it will show you what you’re missing—and you’ll understand why it’s well past time you dropped by.
See More
1
The Magic Kingdom
by Steven Watts
University of Missouri Press, 2001
The Magic Kingdom sheds new light on the cultural icon of "Uncle Walt."  Watts digs deeply into Disney's private life, investigating his roles as husband, father, and brother and providing fresh insight into his peculiar psyche-his genuine folksiness and warmth, his domineering treatment of colleagues and friends, his deepest prejudices and passions.  Full of colorful sketches of daily life at the Disney Studio and tales about the creation of Disneyland and Disney World, The Magic Kingdom offers a definitive view of one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century.

See More
2
Carnival in the Countryside
by Chris Rasmussen
University of Iowa Press, 2015
More than a century and a half after its founding, the Iowa State Fair is the state’s central institution, event, and symbol. New Jersey has the Shore; Kentucky has the Derby; Iowa has the Fair. The humble Iowa State Fairground ranks alongside the Great Pyramids at Giza and the Taj Mahal in the best-selling travel guide 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. During its annual run each August, the fair attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors who make the pilgrimage to the fairground to see the iconic butter cow, to ride the Old Mill, to walk through the livestock barns, and to people-watch. At the same time that they enjoy fried candy bars and roller coasters, Iowans also compete to raise the best corn and zucchinis, to make the best jams and jellies, to rear the finest sheep and goats, the largest cattle and hogs, and the handsomest horses.

This tension between entertainment and agriculture goes back all the way to the fair’s founding in the mid-1800s, as historian Chris Rasmussen shows in this thought-provoking history. The fair’s founders had lofty aims: they sought to improve agriculture and foster a distinctively democratic American civilization. But from the start these noble intentions jostled up against people’s desire to have fun and make money, honestly or otherwise—not least because the fair had to pay for itself. In their effort to uplift rural life without going broke, the organizers of the Iowa State Fair debated the respectability of horse racing and gambling and struggled to find qualified livestock judges. Worried about the economic forces undermining rural families, they ran competitions to select the best babies and the “ideal” rural girl and boy while luring spectators with massive panoramas of earthquakes and fires, not to mention staged trainwrecks. In short, the Iowa State Fair has as much to tell us about human nature and American history as it does about growing corn.
See More
3
Governing Sound
by Jocelyne Guilbault
University of Chicago Press, 2007

Calypso music is an integral part of Trinidad’s national identity. When, for instance, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked the great Trinidadian musician Roaring Lion where he was from, Lion famously replied “the land of calypso.” But in a nation as diverse as Trinidad, why is it that calypso has emerged as the emblematic music?

In Governing Sound, Jocelyne Guilbault examines the conditions that have enabled calypso to be valorized, contested, and targeted as a field of cultural politics in Trinidad. The prominence of calypso, Guilbault argues, is uniquely enmeshed in projects of governing and in competing imaginations of nation, race, and diaspora. During the colonial regime, the period of national independence, and recent decades of neoliberal transformation, calypso and its musical offshoots have enabled new cultural formations while simultaneously excluding specific social expressions, political articulations, and artistic traditions. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic work, Guilbault maps the musical journeys of Trinidad’s most prominent musicians and arrangers and explains the distinct ways their musical sensibilities became audibly entangled with modes of governing, audience demands, and market incentives.

Generously illustrated and complete with an accompanying CD, Governing Sound constitutes the most comprehensive study to date of Trinidad’s carnival musics.

See More
4
Inside the Mouse
by The Project on Disney The Project on Disney
Duke University Press, 1995
This entertaining and playful book views Disney World as much more than the site of an ideal family vacation. Blending personal meditations, interviews, photographs, and cultural analysis, Inside the Mouse looks at Disney World’s architecture and design, its consumer practices, and its use of Disney characters and themes. This book takes the reader on an alternative ride through "the happiest place on earth" while asking "What makes this forty-three-square-mile theme park the quintessential embodiment of American leisure?"
Turning away from the programmed entertainment that Disney presents, the authors take a peek behind the scenes of everyday experience at Disney World. In their consideration of the park as both private corporate enterprise and public urban environment, the authors focus on questions concerning the production and consumption of leisure. Featuring over fifty photographs and interviews with workers that strip "cast members" of their cartoon costumes, this captivating work illustrates the high-pressure dynamics of the typical family vacation as well as a tour of Disney World that looks beyond the controlled facade of themed attractions.
As projects like EuroDisney and the proposed Disney America test the strength of the Disney cultural monolith, Inside the Mouse provides a timely assessment of the serious business of supplying pleasure in contemporary U.S. culture. Written for the general reader interested in the many worlds of Disney, this engrossing volume will also find fans among students and scholars of cultural studies.
See More
5
Theme Park
by Scott A. Lukas
Reaktion Books, 2008
Theme parks are a uniquely interactive and enduring form of entertainment that have influenced architecture, technology, and culture in surprising ways for more than a century, as Scott Lukas now reveals in his compelling historical chronicle.

Theme Park takes the primitive amusements of pleasure gardens as its starting point and launches from there into a rich, in-depth investigation of the evolution of the theme park over the twentieth century. Lukas examines theme parks in countries around the world—including in the United States, Mexico, Europe, Japan, China, South Africa, and Australia—and how themed fairs and parks developed through diverse means and in a variety of settings. The book examines world-famous and lesser-known parks, including the early parks of Coney Island; Madrid’s Movieworld; a series of World Fairs and their luxurious exhibition halls; Six Flags parks and virtual theme parks today; and, of course, the unparalleled achievements of Disneyland and Disney World.

Lukas analyzes the theme park as a living entity that unexpectedly shapes people, their relationships, and the world around them. Theme parks have now become complex representations of the human mind itself, he contends, through its interpretations of books, feature films, video games, and Web sites. Ultimately, Theme Park reveals, the wider influence of theme parks can be found in the shopping malls, branded stores, and casinos that employ the tricks and techniques of amusement parks to dominate our entertainment world today.
Packed with captivating illustrations, Theme Park takes us on historical roller coaster ride that both reanimates the places that shaped our childhoods and anticipates the future of escapism and fantasy fun.
 
See More
6
Slayground
by Richard Stark
foreword by Charles Ardai
University of Chicago Press, 2010

The hunter becomes prey, as a heist goes sour and Parker finds himself trapped in a shuttered amusement park, besieged by a bevy of local mobsters, in Slayground. There are no exits from Fun Island. Outnumbered and outgunned, Parker can’t afford a single miscalculation. He’s low on bullets and making it out alive is a long shot—but, as anyone who’s crossed his path knows, no one is better at playing higher stakes with shorter odds.

See More
7
The Incredible Scream Machine
by Robert Cartmell
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987
In 1984 America celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the first successful roller coaster device: La Marcus A. Thompson’s switchback railway, erected at Coney Island. Robert Cartmell examines every phase of roller coaster history, from the use of the roller coaster by Albert Einstein to demonstrate his theory of physics, to John Allen’s use of psychology in designing one.
See More
8
Freak Show
by Robert Bogdan
University of Chicago Press, 1990
From 1840 until 1940, freak shows by the hundreds crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today's standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative—the pornography of disability. Yet for one hundred years the freak show was widely accepted as one of America's most popular forms of entertainment.

Robert Bogdan's fascinating social history brings to life the world of the freak show and explores the culture that nurtured and, later, abandoned it. In uncovering this neglected chapter of show business, he describes in detail the flimflam artistry behind the shows, the promoters and the audiences, and the gradual evolution of public opinion from awe to embarrassment. Freaks were not born, Bogdan reveals; they were manufactured by the amusement world, usually with the active participation of the freaks themselves. Many of the "human curiosities" found fame and fortune, becoming the celebrities of their time, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimans.
See More
9
Click here to go to the beginning.