Dime Museums

(noun)

Institutions providing cheap entertainment and moral education, which were very popular at the end of the nineteenth century among the working classes.

Related Terms

Examples of Dime Museums in the following topics:

  • Cheap Amusements

    • Dime museums were institutions that were briefly popular at the end of the nineteenth century in the United States.
    • In urban centers such as New York City, where many immigrants settled, dime museums were popular and cheap entertainment.
    • The dime museum social trend reached its peak during the Progressive Era.
    • Barnum founded the first dime museum called the "American Museum."
    • Vaudeville had many influences, including the concert saloon, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, and literary burlesque.

  • Vaudeville

    • Vaudeville had many influences, including the concert saloon, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, and literary burlesque.

  • Popular Culture

    • Barnum purchased the American Museum in the Manhattan borough of New York.
    • Barnum's museum was for entertainment, not education, and featured oddities like ventriloquists, midgets, and albinos.
    • Although that store eventually closed down, Woolworth succeeded with a similar store in Lancaster, PA, extending the prices to a dime.
    • Woolworth's "five-and-ten" or "five-and-dime" stores were a huge success.

  • The End of the Frontier

    • The frontier's impact on popular culture was enormous, as evidenced by dime novels, Wild West shows, and, after 1910, Western movies set on the frontier.

  • Sectionalism and the New South

    • The CMLS founded the Confederate Museum to document and defend the Confederate cause and to recall the antebellum mores that the New South's business ethos was displacing.
    • According to Hillyer, by focusing on military sacrifice, rather than on grievances regarding the North, the Confederate Museum aided the process of sectional reconciliation.
    • By depicting slavery as benevolent, the museum's exhibits reinforced the notion that Jim Crow was a proper solution to racial tensions that had escalated during Reconstruction.
    • Lastly, by glorifying the common soldier and portraying the South as "solid," the museum promoted acceptance of industrial capitalism.
    • Thus, the Confederate Museum both critiqued and eased the economic transformations of the New South, and enabled Richmond to reconcile its memory of the past with its hopes for the future.

  • The Western Frontier

    • The lure of quick riches through mining or driving cattle meant that much of the West indeed consisted of rough men living a rough life, although the violence was exaggerated and even glorified in the dime-store novels of the day.

  • The Growth of the Cotton Industry

  • Montgomery and Protests

    • The National City Lines bus, No. 2857, on which Rosa Parks was riding before she was arrested (a GM "old-look" transit bus, serial number 1132), is now a museum exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum.

  • Reactions to Sputnik

    • Sputnik I exhibit in the Missile & Space Gallery at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.

  • City Government and the "Bosses"

    • Under "Boss" Tweed's dominance, the city expanded into the Upper East and Upper West Sides of Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge was begun, land was set aside for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, orphanages and almshouses were constructed, and social services—both directly provided by the state and indirectly funded by state appropriations to private charities—expanded to unprecedented levels.