14a- Inside the Nickelodeon

The History of Film

This was a wonderful episode to produce, even if it was tricky. If you would like to learn all of the things that I didn't get to in this episode, like some of the wonderful names nickelodeon’s had, I really can't recommend At The Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture by Kathryn Fuller enough. I wish there was an audiobook for it (but I feel that way about every book).
A couple of clarifying points–
I assume the "Latin races" that were talked about in the quote from the beginning of the episode were intended to be in reference to people of ethnically Italian origin. I'm fairly confident about this, as I don't think that LatinX people were a major minority population in the metropolitan centers of the Northeastern United States at the turn of the 20th century. People of Italian origin, however, definitely were, which is the basis of my assumption. I use the term "Latin races" as a segue to talk about LatinX peoples in the Southwestern United States, but by doing so I was removing the term from its original context.
Women were not common in Nickelodeons of the South and Midwest, but undoubtedly some women, on rare occasions, would have seen movies. I'm not aware of any legal blockade against women attending movies, as was the case with the black populations of the South, but rather extremely powerful social and religious conventions. Still, for all intents and purposes, as I stated in the show, nickelodeons in these regions were dominated by white men and boys.
The song I played in the show was "Let's Go into a Picture Show" as performed by Byron G. Harlan. It was written by Jack Norworth and was released as an Edison Phonograph record in 1909. If you would like to listen to the song in full (I didn't play the first verse in the show) you can look it up on YouTube, or, as I did, the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive.

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