What did young, independent women do for fun and how did they pay their way into New York City's turn-of-the-century pleasure places? Cheap Amusements is a fascinating discussion of young working women whose meager wages often fell short of bare subsistence and rarely allowed for entertainment expenses.

Kathy Peiss follows working women into saloons, dance halls, Coney Island amusement parks, social clubs, and nickelodeons to explore the culture of these young women between 1880 and 1920 as expressed in leisure activities. By examining the rituals and styles they adopted and placing that culture in the larger context of urban working-class life, she offers us a complex picture of the dynamics shaping a working woman's experience and consciousness at the turn-of-the-century. Not only does her analysis lead us to new insights into working-class culture, changing social relations between single men and women, and urban courtship, but it also gives us a fuller understanding of the cultural transformations that gave rise to the commercialization of leisure.

The early twentieth century witnessed the emergence of "heterosocial companionship" as a dominant ideology of gender, affirming mixed-sex patterns of social interaction, in contrast to the nineteenth century's segregated spheres. Cheap Amusements argues that a crucial part of the "reorientation of American culture" originated from below, specifically in the subculture of working women to be found in urban dance halls and amusement resorts.

The End is always near. The Apocalypse has sparked imaginations for millennia, while in more recent times, highly publicized predictions have thrust End-Time theology briefly into the spotlight. In the 21st century, fictional depictions of various apocalyptic scenarios are found in an endless stream of films, TV shows, and novels, while real-world media coverage of global issues including climate change and the migrant crisis often features an apocalyptic tone. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances explores this prevalent human desire to envision the End by analyzing how various live End-Time performances allow people to live in and through future time.
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The book’s main focus is contemporary Christian End-Time performances and how they theatrically construct encounters with future time—not just images or ideas of a future, but viscerally and immediately real experiences of future time. Author Jill Stevenson’s examples are Hell Houses and Judgement Houses; Rapture House, a similarly styled “walk through drama” in North Carolina; Hell’s Gates, an “outdoor reality drama” in Dawsonville, Georgia; Ark Encounter, a full-size recreation of Noah’s Ark; and Tribulation Trail, an immersive thirteen-scene drama ministry based on the Book of Revelation. The book’s coda considers similarities between these Christian performances and secular survivalist prepper events, especially with respect to constructions of and language about time. In doing so, the author situates these performances within a larger tradition that challenges traditional secular/sacred distinctions and illuminates how the End Times has been employed in our current social and political moment.