ABSTRACT
In 2008, the world's population was split evenly between rural and urban areas for the first time. Even for the majority of people who lived outside urban areas in the 1930s, the city was synonymous with modernity. For Europeans, and eventually for most of the world, the "modern" entailed its antithesis, the "primitive". Europeans projected a stadial model of historical development onto the diversity of world cultures. Cosmopolitanism and the mixing of social orders, classes, sexes, ethnic and racial groups, and cultures defined urban modernity in the 1930s, providing the source of cities' appeal and the fears it sparked and producing a diversity of oppositional subcultures. Innovations in the recording and reproduction of sound transformed the experience of cinema-goers during the 1930s. Produced and released in the United States in 1927, The Jazz Singer was the first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue; the "talkie" inaugurated a new era of film history.
