Bobblehead doll

Hunter, Tim - Bobbing Head Dolls: 1960-2000 (Krause Publications, 2000). "Busses" is sometimes used, but is also the plural of "buss", a dialectal word for "kiss" or a type of boat. The millennium would bring a new type of bobblehead toy, the mini-bobblehead, standing just two or three inches tall and used for cereal prizes and such. The usual plural of bus is "buses". The variety of bobbleheads on the market rose exponentially to include even relatively obscure popular culture figures and notable people. Congress to the pass the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act which clarified the unconstitutionality of public racial segregation laws. It was now possible to make bobbleheads in the very limited numbers necessary for them to be viable collectibles. Supreme Court ruling banning segregation on public buses and helped lead the U.S.

What finally prompted their resurgence was cheaper manufacturing processes, and the main bobblead material switched once again, this time from ceramic to plastic. This incident, boycotts of bus services, other protests, and court challenges led a U.S. Although older bobbleheads like the baseball teams and The Beatles were sought-after by collectors during this period, new bobblehead dolls were few and far between. In 1955, after a long day of work, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus, bringing attention to the injustice of differential and degrading treatment based solely upon race. It would take nearly two decades before bobbleheads returned to prominence. These laws and enforcement varied among communities and states. By the mid-1970s, though, the bobblehead craze was in the process of winding down. For instance, Jim Crow laws required bus drivers to enforce separate seating sections.

One of the most famous bobbleheads of all time also hails from this era: The Beatles bobblehead set, which is a valuable collectible today. These were made to prevent African-Americans from doing things that a white person could do. Over the next decade, after a switch in materials from paper-mache to ceramic, bobbleheads would be produced for other sports, as well as cartoon characters. In the period after the American Civil War ended in 1865, racial segregation in public accommodations, including public transport such as rail and bus services, was enforced through Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The 1961 World Series brought the first player-specific baseball bobbleheads, for Roberto Clemente, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Willie Mays, still all with the same face. Bus services were also a focal point in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. By 1960, Major League Baseball had gotten in on the action and produced a series of paper-mache bobblehead dolls, one for each team, all with the same cherubic face. Under a busing plan, children do not necessarily go to the nearest school geographically, but to such a school where there is an appropriate mix of racial diversity.

Bobbleheads as we know them today began to gain ground in the 1950s. In some areas of the United States, a forced busing system has been used to achieve racial desegregation of public schools. Although not strictly considered bobblehead dolls, some examples of Japanese netsuke exist with bobblehead-like spring-operated features. A similar phenomenon is Duck Tours, which uses DUKWs converted into buses/cruise boats for tour purposes. Early bobbleheads depicting animals were sold by street vendors as novelties; presumably, most were bought as gifts for children. Some places have buses that resemble streetcars in order to attract tourists or otherwise look nice (see right). While the word bobblehead was not used directly, the main character's neck was described as "like the necks of plaster cats which wag their heads". A new phenomenon in intercity bus travel has been the Chinatown bus.

The exact origin of the bobblehead doll is unknown, though first known reference to a bobblehead doll in literature was in Nikolai Gogol's famous 1842 short story "The Overcoat". Intercity bus services have become an important travel connection to smaller towns and rural areas in the United States that do not have airports or train service. Bobblehead dolls are sometimes given out to ticket buyers at sporting events as a promotion. Buses are an intrinsic part of everyday life, and play an important part in the social fabric of many countries. Watson, they are most associated with athletes, and baseball players in particular. When motorized transport proved successful after ca 1905, a motorized omnibus was for a time sometimes called an autobus. Although bobblehead dolls have been made with a wide variety of figures such as vampiric cereal pitchman Count Chocula, beat generation author Jack Kerouac, and Nobel-prize-winning geneticist James D. The streetcars would become even more centrally important than the omnibus in the future of urbanization.

Instead of a solid connection, its head is connected to the body by a spring in such a way that a light tap will cause the head to bobble, hence the name. The new streetcars were financed by John Mason, a wealthy banker, and built by an Irish contractor, John Stephenson. Its head is often oversized compared to its body. Within a very few years, the New York omnibus had a rival in the streetcar: the first streetcar ran along The Bowery, which offered the excellent improvement in amenity of riding on smooth iron rails rather than clattering over granite setts, called "Belgian blocks". A bobblehead doll, also known as a bobbing head doll or wobbler is a type of collectible doll. More intense urbanization was to follow. The lyrics compare the act of dancing to the motion of a bobblehead, with the chorus: "...take it to the floor and act like a fool / shake it, shake it, shake it like a bobblehead...". The omnibus offered the nearer suburbs more access to the inner city.

Child rapper L'il Romeo's album Romeoland includes a song called "Bobblehead". The walk from the former village of Paddington to the business heart of London in the "City" was a brisk one for a young man in good condition. In 2003, as a promotional stunt, cable network GSN unveiled the "Chucklehead", an 11-foot-tall, 900-pound bobblehead statue of game show host Chuck Woolery. The omnibus also extended the reach of the North Atlantic post-Georgian, post-Federal city. In the Firefly episode "Trash", the characters discuss a shipment of bobblehead geisha dolls they smuggled and sold. The idea of the "carriage trade", the folk who never set foot in the streets, who had goods brought out from the shops for their appraisal, has its origins in the omnibus crush. See the "History" section above for details. A new division in urban society now came to the fore, dividing those who kept carriages from those who did not.

Bobbleheads are referred to in the Nikolai Gogol short story The Overcoat in 1842. Only the very poor remained excluded. Socially, the omnibus put city-dwellers, even if for only half an hour, into previously-unheard-of physical intimacy with strangers, squeezing them together knee-to-knee (illustration, left). The omnibus had many repercussions for society, particularly in that it encouraged urbanization. In 1831, New Yorker Washington Irving remarked of Britain's Reform Act (finally passed in 1832): "The great reform omnibus moves but slowly.".

The New York omnibus quickly moved into the urban consciousness. In return, the company agreed to maintain certain minimum levels of service—though one of these standards was not upholstery. In most cases, the city governments granted a private company—generally a small stableman already in the livery or freight-hauling business—an exclusive franchise to operate public coaches along a specified route. Other American cities soon followed suit: Philadelphia in 1831, Boston in 1835 and Baltimore in 1844.

In New York, omnibus service began in the same year, when Abraham Brower, an entrepreneur who had organized volunteer fire companies, established a route along Broadway starting at Bowling Green. This bus service was operated by George Shillibeer. A London newspaper reported in July 4, 1829 that “the new vehicle, called the omnibus, commenced running this morning from Paddington to the City”. Whether by direct emulation, or because the idea was in the air, by 1832 the idea had been copied in Paris, Bordeaux and Lyons.

His omnibus featured wooden benches that ran down the sides of the vehicle; entry was from the rear. His new voiture omnibus ("carriage for all") combined the functions of the hired hackney carriage with the stagecoach that travelled a predetermined route from inn to inn, carrying passengers and mail. When he discovered that passengers were just as interested in getting off at intermediate points as in patronizing his baths, he shifted the stage line's focus. The omnibus, the first organized public transit system, may have originated in Nantes, France in 1826, when a retired army officer who had built public baths on the city's edge set up a short stage line between the center of town and his baths.

. The name is a shortened version of omnibus, which means "for everyone". A bus is a large, motorized, wheeled vehicle intended to carry numerous persons in addition to the driver. School bus.

Shuttle bus. Guided bus. Gyrobus. Trolleybus.

Minibus. Midibus. Low-floor bus. Articulated bus.

Double-decker bus. Coach / Motorcoach.