I'm scraping my boots on the 20 year rule here, but the "Three Tenors" craze was something of an oddity in the vocal art singing world, but also something with a long heritage. Super-star singers selling out seats was nothing new at all, but the unique thing here is that they were a package deal, even with their own little band name (that was copied by many others after their success). And while the presentation of operatic arias outside of opera was nothing new at all (singing concerts of random arias goes back to the 1700s), this set off a big demand for "stadium-classical" crossover artists. Micing became more acceptable, as no one (even the greatest singers) can fill a stadium with the naked voice. Unlike the original Three Tenors most of these crossover artists working today are not actual opera singers, but the trend was started by opera singers who had absolutely payed their dues to art and were very talented, and they made some serious bank. The dominance of tenors above all other male voices (helped along by the Three Tenors) is starting to fade out though, right now countertenors are very trendy, and baritones are starting to see more star time.

NPR had a rather thoughtful article about them a while back. Tenor: the history of a voice also has a good discussion of their work and its influence on the tenor voice.

One of the fun fads of the early 19th Century among Alaska Natives was the collecting of Chinese boxes. Back before the Alaska Purchase, the Russian-American Company ran a profitable triangular trade among Alaska, China and Russia. Furs from Alaska would go to China to be sold for cash or Chinese products that in turn would be taken to Russia and sold. Proceeds would buy supplies for the Alaskan operations (though those supplies were increasingly bought from non-Russian sources).

One of the interesting aspects of this trade was the way in which Chinese goods ended up in Alaska, as the Russian traders short-circuited the process by buying trade goods in China for use in Alaska. These goods were commonly shipped in beautiful lacquered boxes. Once the Russians had sold their trade goods, they'd frequently sell the box they came in. These boxes grew in popularity, particularly in Southeast Alaska, to the point that they became trade goods in and of themselves. There's a particularly nice one on display at the Wrangell Museum in Wrangell, Alaska, and I've seen others at the Anchorage Museum and the Museum of the North in Fairbanks.

These Chinese boxes actually outlasted the Russians, as American traders also offered them after the Alaska Purchase.

One of my favorite ways to look at the development of acting is through fads/trends.

We have the massive array of modern ones (and this is ONLY A TINY AMOUNT of the big ones, let alone the breathtaking amount of other smaller trends or microtrends), such as the highly physicalized Viewpoints; the devastatingly realized Meisner Technique; or "American Method".

One of the coolest pieces with that is how each technique leads to visibly different performances and interpretations of the same text.

But even taking this tendency back in time: in An Actor's Work, Stanislavski mentions a bunch of different schools of acting, almost all of which, save a very odd one called "representational" are lost to the ages.

Even Goethe was massively influential on acting trends: his Rules for Actors set the stage for how actors did their job for many, many years. It's worth a read - he seems to be outlining a method by which a good actor would, in doing their job perfectly, look like the sort of horrible actor we mock these days!

But that's the interesting thing - Goethe's stilted and artificial form of acting was how the job was done for a very long time. In large part, that's why movies from the early 1900s are so showy (this also has to do with Vaudevillian influence, which leads to a massive other array of trends entirely), and, over time, we have gone from there, to the realism we expect now.

Bear in mind that this list doesn't even BEGIN to scratch the incredible breadth and depth of what is, ultimately, a very personal mode of creativity (and I intentionally missed some of my absolute favorite forms so as to not go on forever: clown is awesome, and highly influential, as are some immersive groups like Punchdrunk. All the same, it's some cool stuff to think about, especially in relation to how actors in modern movies and plays operate over time!

Nineteen twenties USA had some rather interesting crazes, whilst the infamous dance marathons are commonly cited, the had some slightly stranger ones making waves at the time, such as flagpole sitting - the record for which currently stands at 125 days.

Can anyone tell me why snuff fell out of favor... or how it ever wound up in favor to begin with?

And what was the deal with Colonial-era nutmeg boxes?