San Antonio College Library

Based on stories and sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne, on Thomas Morton's New Canaan, and on Herman Melville's Benito Cereno.

The fifty-year period from 1880 to 1929 is the richest era for theater in American history, certainly in the great number of plays produced and artists who contributed significantly, but also in the centrality of theater in the lives of Americans. As the impact of European modernism began to gradually seep into American theater during the 1880s and quite importantly in the 1890s, more traditional forms of theater gave way to futurism, symbolism, surrealism,...

The blackface minstrel show occupies a central and contested space in the history of American popular culture. Its imitations and parodies helped shape society's perceptions of African Americans - and of women - and made their mark on national identity, policymaking decisions, and other entertainment forms such as vaudeville, burlesque, the revue, and, eventually, film, radio, and television. Gathered here are rare primary materials - including firsthand...

"The songs, dances, jokes, parodies, spoofs, and skits of blackface groups such as the Virginia Minstrels and Buckley's Serenaders became wildly popular in antebellum America. Drawing on an unprecedented archival study of playbills, newspapers, sketches, monologues, and music, William J. Mahar explores the racist practices of minstrel entertainers and considers their performances as troubled representations of ethnicity, class, gender, and culture...

Carnival, charivari, mumming plays, peasant festivals, and even early versions of the Santa Claus myth - all of these forms of entertainment influenced and shaped blackface minstrelsy in the first half of the nineteenth century. In his fascinating study Demons of Disorder, musicologist Dale Cockrell studies issues of race and class by analyzing their cultural expressions, and investigates the roots of still-remembered songs such as "Jim Crow," "Zip...

"As the United States transitioned from a rural nation to an urbanized, industrial giant between the War of 1812 and the early twentieth century, ordinary people struggled over the question of what it meant to be American. As Brian Roberts shows in Blackface Nation, this struggle is especially evident in popular culture and the interplay between two specific strains of music: middle-class folk and blackface minstrelsy. The Hutchinson Family Singers,...

'Uncle Tom Mania' looks at the novel 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and the songs, plays, sketches, translations and imitations it inspired. In particular it shows how the theatrical mode of blackface minstrelsy, the question of enslavement, and America's emerging cultural identity affected how the novel was read and discussed. "Until Uncle Tom's Cabin, Meer says, little truly common ground existed on which the United States and Britain could debate slavery....