Crowds and Leisure: Thinking Comparatively Across the 20th Century‪.‬

The not-so-new social history movement that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s was strongly identified with the first industrialization and its social consequences. Despite the fact that the 20th century is now history, social historians have been slow to develop conceptual frameworks for and empirical studies of distinct trends in that century. In part, of course, this reflects the intellectual conservatism in the training of historians (who all-too-often are copies of their advisors) and the fact that 20th century historiography remains primarily political and military due to the impact of the two world wars. But there remains a curious lack of interest in broader social trends that span the entire century. And, even today, despite all the changes of the last twenty years, few students would be encouraged to do the equivalent of what I did when I wrote in 1966 a term paper on Stalin's purge of music in 1948 for the European survey course. Among the many social trends that this intellectual conservatism has obscured is the expansion and transformation of leisure in the long (uneven and inequitable) trend toward affluence in the 20th century. This reflects a traditional bias toward the "serious" study of production and power relations and the presumption that free time use is merely a reflection of those relations. And, when leisure became a topic of study, it is often cast in terms of class, ethnic, gender, or religious identities. This makes the content and transformations of free time serve as derivative arenas for the expressions of identities and conflicts formed or with consequences in the worlds of work, politics, and elsewhere. As Rudy Kushar notes, leisure and consumption cannot be reduced as Theodore Adorno once suggested to "afterimages of the work process." This perspective surely has dominated historical analyses of leisure--as manipulations of capital, reproductions of class conflict, and compensations for alienated labor. With the decline of Marxism and laborist perspectives since the late 80s, the historical study of leisure has lacked a trajectory.