You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Performing Menken uses the life experiences of controversial actress and poet Adah Isaacs Menken to examine the culture of the Civil War period and what Menken's choices reveal about her period. It explores the roots of the cult of celebrity that emerged from crucible of war. While discussing Menken's racial and ethnic claims and her performance of gender and sexuality, Performing Menken focuses on contemporary use of social categories to explain patterns in America's past and considers why such categories appear to remain important.
This is a biography of the controversial and flamboyant nineteenth century doctor Francis Tumblety. The doctor's exploits include arrests for complicity in the Lincoln assassination, selling abortion drugs, killing patients, indecent assault, and scrutiny as a possible suspect in the "Jack the Ripper" murders. Tumblety's sheen of respectability appeared crafted to cover his homosexuality and his provocative fields of practice.
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. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask not only explores the racist practices of these entertainers but considers their performances as troubled representations of ethnicity, class, gender, and culture in the nineteenth century. William J. Mahar's unprecedented archival study of playbills, newspapers, sketches, monologues, and music engages new sources previously not considered in twentieth-century scholarship. More than any other study of its kind, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask investigates the relationships between blackface comedy ...
None