The historian who revisits well-trodden ground must offer either something new or at least a new way of looking at it. In “American Fun” John Beckman does both — stringing unfamiliar episodes of ...

Several years ago, driving down the Atlantic coast to Georgia, I looked out my window to find that I was being paced by a woman on a quad. I must have done a double-take, like the Navy pilot who sees ...

To construct the history of an elusive subject is a tough task. It's all the more challenging when the topic isn't concrete, like a war or a life, but a theme, abstract, without obvious borders but ...

Beckman, an English professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, traces the “three tributaries of American fun—the commercial, playful, and radically political,” from Thomas Morton’s anarchic Merry Mount ...

The historian who revisits well-trodden ground must offer either something new or at least a new way of looking at it. In “American Fun,” John Beckman does both — stringing unfamiliar episodes of ...

AMERICAN FUN: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt. By John Beckman. Pantheon. 326 pages. $28.95. I wish this book were more fun. It ought to be, with the dust cover displaying the "Fun" as spray-painted ...