For almost a hundred years before Uncle Tom's Cabin burst on to the scene in 1852, the American theatre struggled to represent the evils of slavery. Slavery and Sentiment questions how the text, images, and performances presented to American audiences during the antebellum period engaged with the debate over black participation in American society. The book reconsiders traditional comic stereotypes like Jim Crow, as well as familiar sentimental ones, such as Uncle Tom. Using plays, poetry, performances, popular novels, and political cartoons, Heather Nathans blends American history, theatre history, and literary history to question how theatre and performance lifted the 'veil of black' on American racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book contributes to the ongoing discussion of the role of African-American characters and performers in American cultural history, offering scholars in a range of fields a new perspective on a complicated moment in the nation's theatrical past.

Theatre has often served as a touchstone for moments of political change or national definition and as a way of exploring cultural and ethnic identity. In this 2003 book, Heather Nathans examines the growth and influence of the theatre in the development of the young American Republic, from the Revolution through to the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Unlike many works on the early American theatre, this book explores the lives and motives of the people working behind the scenes to establish a new national drama. Some of the most famous figures in American history, from George Washington to Sam Adams, from John Hancock to Alexander Hamilton, battled over the creation of the American theatre. The book traces their motives and strategies - suggesting that for many of these men, the question of whether or not Americans should go to the playhouse meant the difference between the success and failure of the Revolutionary mission.

Theater has often served as a touchstone for moments of political change or national definition and as a way of exploring cultural and ethnic identity. Heather Nathans examines its growth and influence in the development of the young American Republic--from the Revolution through the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Unlike many works on early American theater, this book explores the lives and motives of the people working behind the scenes to establish a new national drama.

For almost a hundred years before Uncle Tom's Cabin burst on to the scene in 1852, the American theatre struggled to represent the evils of slavery. Slavery and Sentiment questions how the text, images, and performances presented to American audiences during the antebellum period engaged with the debate over black participation in American society. The book reconsiders traditional comic stereotypes like Jim Crow, as well as familiar sentimental ones, such as Uncle Tom. Using plays, poetry, performances, popular novels, and political cartoons, Heather Nathans blends American history, theatre history, and literary history to question how theatre and performance lifted the 'veil of black' on American racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book contributes to the ongoing discussion of the role of African-American characters and performers in American cultural history, offering scholars in a range of fields a new perspective on a complicated moment in the nation's theatrical past.

Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia considers the cultural, political, and religious contexts shaping the long struggle against racial injustice in one of early America's most important cities. Comprised of nine scholarly essays by a distinguished group of historians, the volume recounts the antislavery movement in Philadelphia from its marginalized status during the colonial era to its rise during the Civil War.

Philadelphia was the home to the Society of Friends, which offered the first public attack on slavery in the 1680s; the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the western world's first antislavery group; and to generations of abolitionists who organized some of early America's most important civil rights groups.

These abolitionists -- black, white, religious, secular, male, female -- grappled with the meaning of black freedom earlier and more consistently than anyone else in early American culture. Cutting-edge academic views illustrate Philadelphia's antislavery movement, how it survived societal opposition, and how it remained vital to evolving notions of racial justice.

Shakespearean Educations examines how and why Shakespeare's works shaped the development of American education from the colonial period through the 1934 Chicago World's Fair, taking the reader up to the years before the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (popularly known as the GI Bill), coeducation, and a nascent civil rights movement would alter the educational landscape yet again. The essays in this collection query the nature of education, the nature of citizenship in a democracy, and the roles of literature, elocution, theater, and performance in both. Expanding the notion of "education" beyond the classroom to literary clubs, private salons, public lectures, libraries, primers, and theatrical performance, this collection challenges scholars to consider how different groups in our society have adopted Shakespeare as part of a specifically "American" education. Shakespearean Educations maps the ways in which former slaves, Puritan ministers, university leaders, and working class theatergoers used Shakespeare not only to educate themselves about literature and culture, but also to educate others about their own experience. Published by University of Delaware Press.

Whereas previous studies of poverty and early modern theatre have concentrated on England and the criminal rogue,Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theatre and Performance takes atransnational approach, which reveals a greater range of attitudesand charitable practices regarding the poor than state poor laws and rogue books suggest. Close study of German and Latin beggar catalogues, popular songs performed in Italian piazzas, the Paduan actorplaywright Ruzante, the commedia dell'arte in both Italy and France, and Shakespeare demonstrate how early modern theatre and performance could reveal the gap between official policy and actual practices regarding the poor. The actorbased theatre and performance traditions examined in this study, which persistently explore felt connections between the itinerant actor and the vagabond beggar, evoke the poor through complex and variegated forms of imagination, thought, and feeling. Early modern theatre does not simply reflect the social ills of hunger, poverty, and degradation, but works them through the forms of poverty, involving displacement, condensation, exaggeration, projection, fictionalization, and marginalization. As the critical mass of medieval charity was put into question, the beggaralmsgiver encounter became more like a performance. But it was not a performance whose script was prewritten as the inevitable exposure of the dissembling beggar. Just as people's attitudes toward the poor could rapidly change from skepticism to sympathy during famines and times of acute need, fictions of performance such as Edgar's dazzling impersonation of a mad beggar in Shakespeare's King Lear could prompt responses of sympathy and even radical calls for economic redistribution.

From 1918’s Tickless Time through Waiting for Lefty, Death of a Salesman,A Streetcar Named Desire, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Prisoner ofSecond Avenue to 2005’s The Clean House, domestic labor has figuredlargely on American stages. No dramatic genre has done morethan the one often dismissively dubbed “kitchen sink realism”to both support and contest the idea that the home is naturallywomen’s sphere. But there is more to the genre than even its supporterssuggest. In analyzing kitchen sink realisms, Dorothy Chansky revealsthe ways that food preparation, domestic labor, dining, serving,entertaining, and cleanup saturate the lives of dramatic charactersand situations even when they do not take center stage. Offeringresistant readings that rely on close attention to the particular culturaland semiotic environments in which plays and their audiencesoperated, she sheds compelling light on the changing debatesabout women’s roles and the importance of their household laboracross lines of class and race in the twentieth century. The story begins just after World War I, as more households wereelectrified and fewer middleclass housewives could afford to hiremaids. In the 1920s, popular mainstream plays staged the plightof women seeking escape from the daily grind; African Americanplaywrights, meanwhile, argued that housework was the least ofwomen’s worries. Plays of the 1930s recognized housework aswork to a greater degree than ever before, while during the waryears domestic labor was predictably recruited to the war effort—sometimes with genderbending results. In the famously quiescentand anxious 1950s, critiques of domestic normalcy became common,and African American maids gained a complexity previouslyreserved for white leading ladies. These critiques proliferated withthe reemergence of feminism as a political movement from the1960s on. After the turn of the century, the problems and comfortsof domestic labor in black and white took center stage. In highlightingthese shifts, Chansky brings the real home.