From Traveling Show to Vaudeville : Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830-1910.

Intro -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE -- INTRODUCTION: From Celebration to Show Business -- THE DIME MUSEUM -- Early Museum Shows -- Selling and Seeing Curiosities -- Commentary -- Dog Days of the Museum -- MINSTRELSY -- Routines: Songs, Speeches, Dialogue, and Farce -- Commentary: Rise and Fall of ''Slave'' Creativity -- Reminiscences -- Musical Comedy: Harrigan's Mulligan Guard -- Confessions of an African American Minstrel -- THE CIRCUS -- The Circus Debated -- The Early Circus -- Big Business -- The Audience -- MELODRAMA -- A Plea for an American Drama -- Classic Melodrama -- Classic Melodrama's Audiences -- The Ten-Twenty-Thirty Melodramas -- ''LEG SHOW'' BURLESQUE EXTRAVAGANZAS -- The Black Crook -- A Burlesque of Burlesque -- Reactions to the Controversy -- The Popular-Price Circuit -- THE WILD WEST SHOW -- Origins -- Extracts from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Programs -- Exhibiting Indians -- SUMMER AMUSEMENT PARKS -- Journalists and the ''New'' Coney -- Showmen and the ''Amusement Business'' -- Popular Responses -- Two Critics of Coney's Banality -- VAUDEVILLE -- Vaudeville Defined -- The Business -- Routines -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY -- INDEX -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.

Many of the pieces collected here have not been published since their first appearance, making From Traveling Show to Vaudeville an indispensable resource for historians of popular culture, theater, and nineteenth-century American society.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.