Kasson, John F. Amusing the Millions: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, American Century Series. New York: Hill & Want, 1978.
Coney Island, the couple of miles of beachfront property on the southwestern end of Long Island known for its carnival sense of amusement, is the focus of Kasson's case study. His title, Amusing the Million, is taken from a quote by Fredric Thompson, manager of Luna Park, one of the major amusement parks of early twentieth-century Coney Island. The book examines the history and the neoclassical architecture of the area by using pictures, post cards, old magazines, and historical research. The quality that sets Kasson's work apart from some of the more "descriptive" analyses of Coney Island is his attention to the emergence of mass culture and the overall "cultural revolt against genteel standards of taste and conduct" in American society and leisure culture during the turn of the (twentieth) century. He situates amusement parks as "laboratories of the new mass culture." Kasson examines 1985 to 1920 as the hey-day of Coney Island's liberatory play. The book examines how people became "freed from normative demands" while partaking of the carnival culture of amusement that Coney Island offered. Leisure was opening to all classes and ethnicities during this period as it never had before. The book ends with the completion of the subway from New York to Coney Island and the transformation or taming of the extraordinary freedom and innovation the space possessed in its fledgling years. Kasson concludes "A harbinger of the new mass culture, Coney Island lost its distinctiveness by the very triumph of its values." [N. King]