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This article discusses the thesis that popular music in early twentieth-century Germany was Americanised by shifting the focus from the meaning and reception of music to the way it was produced and disseminated by professionals, from music publishers and composers to bandleaders and critics. Firstly, it stresses a key difference in the way the music business was modernised on both sides of the Atlantic around 1900. While in the US the sheet-music trade became ‘Taylorised’, the music business in Germany, as elsewhere in Continental Europe, was transformed into a rights industry. Secondly, the paper highlights the prominence of Austrian music producers and their repertoire in Germany and suggests that, at least in a business sense, popular music in Germany was Austrianised rather than Americanised. Thirdly, it proposes that ‘Jazz’ after the First World War was hardly a straightforward import of American culture, but a site where incumbents and newcomers to the music profession struggled for position. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In most film histories of the twentieth century Hollywood's dominance has been indisputable. Apparently, European filmmakers were always facing one choice: either imitating the American style or finding a niche in the Hollywood system. This dominance is often referred to as evidence for an ‘Americanisation’ of popular culture in Europe. This article shows that this narrative leaves out a central development between 1927 and 1968: the nationalisation of popular European cinema. The paper asks which conditions facilitated and shaped national film cultures and shows how the political regulation of production in European countries, the momentum of the market, technology and the national industries contributed to the nationalisation of European film. Ultimately, however, the productions of these national cinemas resonated with audiences who sustained them for years following the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historians have labelled the development of modern mass-consumer societies in Europe as a process of ‘Americanisation’. Until today, the consumption of immaterial goods like vacations has been rather neglected by historiography. The purpose of this article is to verify the hypothesis that the United States served as a role model for European vacationing patterns and the evolution of the European travel industry. The paper demonstrates that a simple model of ‘Americanisation’ does not adequately represent the process of partial imitation, adaptation and alteration of American travel patterns through European societies and, more particular, through European holiday providers. National traditions and cultural differences of vacationing continue to exist until today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

European advertising, its aesthetics, institutions and its central organisations, the advertising agencies, were profoundly changed by the arrival of American advertising agencies during the inter-war period. Supported by industrial clients who demanded global communications campaigns, and based on new forms of professional advertising management, these agencies soon dominated the course of European advertising history. During the 1960s, the influence of American advertising agencies began to wane, and global advertising increasingly followed new trends that originated in Europe. This article searches for the origins of this remarkable change of direction. In doing so, it compares the cultural-economic development of major European advertising industries from the immediate post-war years to the twenty-first century. It can be shown that the European advertising industries followed ‘non-American’ pathways in their development, which combined an emphasis on creativity with radically new forms of advertising production and agency management. As a result, successful advertising agencies today look less like American full-service agencies, and much more like the smaller European agencies of the type that had emerged between the world wars. The article discusses these findings in the light of the often-applied term ‘Americanisation’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented that discusses Americanization and European popular culture, noting issue articles on topics such as the drinking of Italian espresso, the replacement of Fordist industry with creative production, and the history of European advertising agencies.