Before phonographs and moving pictures, live performances dominated American popular entertainment. Carnivals, circuses, dioramas, magicians, mechanical marvels, musicians, and theatrical troupes -- all visited rural fairgrounds, small-town opera houses, and big-city palaces around the country, giving millions of people an escape from their everyday lives for a dime or a quarter. In From Traveling Show to Vaudeville, Robert M. Lewis has assembled a remarkable collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century primary sources that document America's age of theatrical spectacle. In eight parts, Lewis explores, in turn, dime museums, minstrelsy, circuses, melodramas, burlesque shows, Wild West shows, amusement parks, and vaudeville.Included in this compendium are biographies, programs, ephemera produced by theatrical entrepreneurs to lure audiences to their shows, photographs, scripts, and song lyrics as well as newspaper accounts, reviews, and interviews with such figures as P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill Cody. Lewis also gives us reminiscences about and reactions to various shows by members of audiences, including such prominent writers as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, O. Henry, and Maxim Gorky. Each section also includes a concise introduction that places the genre of spectacle into its historical and cultural context and suggests major interpretive themes. The book closes with a bibliographic essay that identifies relevant scholarly works.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.
Contents: Introduction: From Celebration to Show BusinessTHE 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 CircuitTHE 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 BanalityVAUDEVILLE Vaudeville Defined The Business Routines
""All-encompassing... it is likely to become a standard work, for media students as well as for American history enthusiasts.""
