Home > social and cultural issues > Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Apotheosis of Celebrities in 20th Century America

Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Apotheosis of Celebrities in 20th Century America

August 14, 2012

Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Apotheosis of Celebrities in 20th Century America

Source: Sociation Today

Although the specific names will vary, everyone can recite from memory, a list of famous or infamous figures from the past – Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Sir Isaac Newton, Madame Curie, Galileo, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell — people whose names live on because of the notable achievements or discoveries they made. But we also recall others such as P.T. Barnum, Sally Rand, Annie Oakley, and "Buffalo Bill" Cody, people known largely for their "celebrity." This raises the question: Have we always been obsessed with celebrity and celebrities, or is this a product of the increased disposable income and leisure afforded by advancing industrial technology? To address this question, we develop a quantitative measure of the cultural attention directed toward celebrities and achievers, and use it to explore trends across the 20th Century.

Advancing industrialization has produced concomitant trends of increasing technological productivity and declining rates of population growth. Together they have produced a more than thirteen-fold growth in real per capita wealth and income in the United States since 1870 (Nolan and Lenski 2009: 219). Anecdotally, this increasing income "surplus" appears to have enabled the population to shift its attention away from issues of survival and subsistence and toward leisure, entertainment, and amusement – more secular "hedonistic" pursuits. At the same time, science, technology, and secular ideologies have greatly undermined and eroded the influence of theistic religions (Nolan and Lenski 2009: 237).

Increasing per capita wealth and increasing leisure time (1) have offered the opportunity for more people to indulge in more hedonistic urges and pursuits, and, this, in turn, has created a growing number of occupations that cater to these pursuits. We believe that, together, these trends may have fundamentally transformed American culture.

See: Dead Men Do Tell Tales: Sociologist Used 100 Years of Obituaries as Cultural Barometer (Science Daily)

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