By Kerri Anne Renzulli
"USA250: The Story of the World's Greatest Economy" is a yearlong WSJ series examining America's first 250 years. Read more about it from Editor in Chief Emma Tucker.
Since the birth of the U.S., artists and entertainers have helped form a distinctly American culture that reflects the ideals, experiences and struggles of the country's diverse inhabitants.
Here's a look at seven people who had an impact on entertainment over the past 250 years. The list is hardly exhaustive, but it offers some of the greatest hits.
P.T. Barnum (1810-91)
The defining showman of the Victorian era, P.T. Barnum is most famous for the circus that still bears his name. But he entertained audiences in many ways, with everything from blatant hoaxes to Shakespearean theater.
Barnum catered to a growing middle class, who were better educated, regularly reading newspapers and magazines, and interested in seeing what the world had to offer, says Robert Wilson, author of "Barnum: An American Life." Of course, some of what he exhibited for his patrons had nothing to do with the real world -- like his infamous Fiji mermaid, purportedly half monkey, half fish.
"He used these humbugs, as he called them, to create excitement and bring people in," Wilson says. "While some may have believed him, most were just entertained by the presentation."
At Barnum's American Museum in New York City, visitors could see America's first aquarium, a menagerie of exotic animals, performances by magicians and ventriloquists, and waxworks. They could also marvel at scientific instruments and modern appliances. Criticism that his exhibits exploited animals and people did little to dampen his success, with some 38 million Americans paying to enter his museum between 1841 and 1865.
The museum also served another purpose: changing public attitudes about theater. By calling his museum's large theater the Moral Lecture Room, he hoped to distance his venue from the seedy theaters of the time. His catered to families, was one of the first in the nation to offer matinees, and showed entertainment like temperance-themed plays and edited versions of historical and Shakespearean plays.
"Barnum helped to make theater and entertainment respectable on a mass level," Wilson says.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96)
Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," first published as a serial in the National Era newspaper starting in 1851, became a challenge to all Americans to stand against slavery.
As a woman with little political power, Stowe turned to literary activism to advance the abolitionist movement and fight against the recently passed Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 -- which she had already defied by housing escaped enslaved people.
Drawing on her experience watching an auction of enslaved people in Kentucky, her many conversations with formerly enslaved people and the narratives they'd written, she crafted an empathetic and moving story depicting the brutalities of slavery and the separation of families.
"Stowe risked her life and the livelihood of her family to write a novel that shook a nation," says Karen Fisk, executive director of the Stowe Center for Literary Activism. "She was strategic; she told a story sure to grip the hearts of her readers, that would provoke tears, outrage and action."
Stowe's novel was published in book form in 1852 and became a bestseller, behind only the Bible in the 19th century. Its runaway popularity made it a lightning rod for debate and controversy. While the book was a powerful force for abolition, the portrayal of the title character -- especially in numerous stage adaptations -- has been criticized by many people as demeaning to Blacks.
"Stowe's novel is still spurring books in response to it," says Fisk. "It was that popular, and its influence has become deeply a part of our culture."
Buffalo Bill Cody (1846-1917)
In the second half of the 19th century, Buffalo Bill Cody turned the Wild West into a global sensation. His larger-than-life exploits and traveling shows defined America's frontier identity and established the cowboy as a national icon, while also transforming Cody into the country's original reality star.
"Cody's both the buckskin-clad frontiersman and the sequined showman," says Paul Andrew Hutton, interim curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyo. "That connection between the reality of Cody as a frontier scout, soldier, hunter and Indian fighter, and then his stage persona -- which is of course Buffalo Bill, the only role he ever had -- is what gives him such incredible cachet and allows him to hold on for 40 years in the entertainment world and revolutionize American show business."
Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and Cody's other circuslike attractions brought audiences across the U.S. and Europe dramatic re-enactments of frontier life, featuring the pony express and stagecoach robberies, feats of skill from sharpshooters Annie Oakley and Lillian Smith, races and rodeo acts, and demonstrations of Native American culture, which even included Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull at one point.
The touring spectacle Cody created, with its air of authenticity, transformed the public's perceptions of the frontier, setting the benchmark for how the West and cowboys would be depicted in popular culture for decades after.
"Cody gave the world its image of cowboys and what the American West was about while creating a new form of entertainment that out-Barnumed P.T. Barnum," says Hutton.
Lois Weber (1879-1939)
In the early 20th century, Lois Weber was among the filmmakers who first used cinema as a way to tackle profound and controversial social issues. She was Universal Studios' highest-paid director for a time before launching her own production company in 1917 -- the first American female director to do so.
While her better-known contemporaries, like Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith, focused on making flashy, big-budget productions, Weber preferred a more intimate and subdued approach, says Shelley Stamp, film and digital-media professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of "Lois Weber in Early Hollywood."
She favored narratives that allowed her to showcase strong female characters while shaping her audience's feelings on issues like contraception, divorce, drug abuse, capital punishment and wage inequity.
To ensure her personal viewpoints got across, Weber was involved in all aspects of production. "No other filmmaker was an auteur in the way that Weber was. Certainly, some filmmakers were both directors and writers, but never also actors and editors," says entertainment historian Anthony Slide, author of "Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History."
Weber also experimented with many new techniques in filmmaking. She was one of the earliest users of the split screen to show simultaneous action, and she helped bring double exposure, overhead shots and on-location filming more into the mainstream of movie creation during her heyday.
Martha Graham (1894-1991)
In challenging the rigid conventions of ballet, Martha Graham redefined what dance looked like in the 20th century. Her technique, with its fierce movements and angular shapes, became a mainstay of American modern dance and remains part of the curriculum at many dance academies worldwide.
"Graham attacked traditional dance on every front," says Janice Ross, Stanford University theater and performance studies emerita professor. "She created a new vocabulary for the body that acknowledged the pull of gravity; she sank into the floor; she danced in bare feet. And she made the not pretty possible -- she introduced audiences to the beauty of ferocity, of power, of rage, of really extreme emotions."
Graham was the first choreographer to work in depth with American themes, Ross says. Her ballet "Appalachian Spring" tells the story of a young pioneer couple starting their life together on the American frontier, while another, "American Document," sought to highlight American democracy and ideals in the face of fascism's rise in 1930s Europe. She also commissioned original scores from American composers, choosing to use contemporary music from her own country -- an unheard-of thing to do when she began, Ross says.
Louis Armstrong (1901-71)
Jazz legend Louis Armstrong reshaped music in the 20th century, developing the instrumental solo as we know it and inspiring generations to let loose and get personal with their singing.
An inventive trumpet and cornet player, Armstrong shifted jazz away from an ensemble experience with collective improvisation to one focused on solo performance. "Armstrong's solos were so brilliant that he basically wrote the rules of how to solo," says Ricky Riccardi, director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum. "Every jazz musician since the 1920s is still kind of following his playbook, as is really anybody who sets out to solo." He set the example that a solo should tell a story, begin sort of quietly, and then build to a big high-note finish or climax.
As distinctive as Armstrong's rich and gravelly voice was -- on such classics as "What a Wonderful World" and "Hello, Dolly!" -- it was how broke from a song's meter that became another influential hallmark of his style. Before Armstrong became popular, most people would sing songs strictly as written, following the melody, rhythm and lyrics outlined on the sheet music. "Everybody sang a song the same way, but he looked at songs like he did jazz," says Riccardi. "He would connect them to something personal in his life, and then sing them in his own fashion."
By rephrasing melodies, throwing in slang, using nonsense syllables, embracing scatting, and making it seem as if he was speaking directly to you, he changed the way people sang and thought about vocal performances.
Armstrong further broke barriers by becoming the first African-American to host a nationally sponsored radio show and get above-the-title featured billing in a major Hollywood film.
Walt Disney (1901-66)
The creator of Mickey Mouse and founder of one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, Walt Disney took animation, film and the theme park to new heights in the 20th century, and produced stories that have fueled the imaginations of generations of children.
From its start in the 1920s, the Walt Disney animation studio became his playground for innovative and adventurous advancements in cartoon creation, filmmaking and camera development. His 1928 animated short, "Steamboat Willie," blew audiences away with the synchronization between the soundtrack and the characters' actions. Its massive success launched Mickey Mouse and Disney to global stardom.
Disney quickly embraced other technological advancements to improve his pictures. In 1932, he released the first film to use the full-color, three-strip Technicolor process, producing cartoons in the rainbow of hues we're accustomed to seeing today. Disney and his team developed a multiplane camera that created the illusion of depth, so audiences could feel as if they were moving through a scene as the background perspective changed. And, he pioneered personality animation, focusing heavily on creating characters with distinctive personalities that seemed to come to life on the screen, says Disney animation historian J.B. Kaufman, author of "Worlds to Conquer: The Art & Making of Walt Disney's Fantasia." All these advances were showcased in 1937's "Snow White," the first feature-length cartoon.
Disney also became obsessed with creating a theme park for families centered on the stories he had brought to life in his movies. "Disney was a storyteller continually thinking outside the box," says Paula Sigman-Lowery, former archivist for the Walt Disney Archives and consultant for the Walt Disney Family Museum. "He wanted to create those same adventures people were loving in his films, but make them participants, put them into that world." The resulting Disneyland was the model for the modern theme park.
The catalog of work Disney helped create before his death in 1966 earned him a record 59 Academy Award nominations and 22 wins. His movies have been added to the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for their cultural significance.
Kerri Anne Renzulli is a writer in Orlando, Fla., and London. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
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January 25, 2026 12:00 ET (17:00 GMT)
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