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

by Robert M. Lewis (Editor)

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.

Genres: History, Music, Theatre

400 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2003

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good info but much dry reading

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible overview of the history of theater in the 19th and early 20th century. Primary sources really give wonderful specifics about how shows were run and how internalized and normative sexist, homophobic and racist attitudes are in a way that I don't think people appreciate or understand about this time period.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work is primarily a compendium of excerpts from primary sources which Lewis has arranged in order to describe the development of a number of major entertainments that developed over the course of the 19th century in the United States: dime museums, minstrelsy, circuses, melodramas, burlesque, wild west shows, amusement parks, and vaudeville. Lewis has collected rich and textured materials here. He provides minimal analysis, but observes in his introduction the foundational nature of this collection. Future historians can examine what he has pulled together and provide the analysis.

My two main takeaways from this book are:

1. Moralizing critiques of popular culture are nothing new. Even 150 years ago, well educated cultural gadflies were decrying the working classes' short attention span and taste for pure amusement...while periodically indulging in these amusements themselves. Apparently high culture has always been sliding steadily and irrevocably downhill, according to the self-appointed arbiters of public taste and decency.

2. American popular entertainment of the 19th century was, not incidentally but at its roots, deeply racist. Minstrelsy, a form of entertainment developed by northern white men who performed with black painted faces in a faux patois meant to mimic southern enslaved African Americans, is now notorious for its gross essentializing and perpetuation of damaging stereotypes of black Americans. I think less well known--or at least less discussed--is how exoticization/denigration of the "Other" (in whatever incarnation) enjoyed general and widespread popularity throughout the 19th century. From the so-called "Wild Men of Borneo" sideshow performers (developmentally disabled brothers of Irish ancestry from Waltham, MA) to the Jolly Darkie Target Game at Coney Island (precisely as aggressively awful as it sounds) and Buffalo Bill Cody's portrayal of Native Americans in his Wild West Show as savages who had been overtaken and tamed by "civilization," white America loved to turn its fascinated gaze on any entertainment that purported to describe the weird, the exotic, the less-than, the different.

And an addendum to takeaway number two above: for each mention Mark Twain gets in American schools as a great writer, there ought to be another mention of what a foul white supremacist he was. Among the many American writers quoted at length by Lewis, none of them come off so alarmingly hateful and racist as does Samuel Clemens...and I mean alarmingly hateful and racist even for a 19th-century white guy. It's so apparent, I'm ashamed it was news to me.

I can't recommend this book enough for the welcome adjustment it provides to the normal inherited view of pre-recorded pop culture as quaint and simple, or of modern pop culture as comparatively sophisticated and novel. Our gadgets have changed. Hopefully we're growing more inclusive as a society, less frightened and fascinated by the sheer fact of difference (although that remains to be seen). But, in the "pop" sense, we still just want to be distracted and dazzled.

[Royce Ratterman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A work filled with original-source 'reprinted' skits, reviews, advertisements, etc. along with photos.
Read for personal historical research. I found this work of immense interest and its contents helpful and inspiring - number rating relates to the book's contribution to my needs.
Overall, this work is also a good resource for the researcher and enthusiast.