A sourcebook of contemporary and historical commentary on America's first popular mass entertainment.

The songs, dances, jokes, parodies, spoofs, and skits of blackface groups such as the Virginia Minstrels and Buckley's Serenaders became wildly popular in anteb

Beginning in the 1830s and continuing for more than a century, blackface minstrelsy--stage performances that claimed to represent the culture of black Americans

Ranging from the laudatory to the openly hostile, 15 essays by prominent African American scholars and critics examine the novel's racist elements and assess th

 The minstrel show occupies a complex and controversial space in the history of American popular culture. Today considered a shameful relic of America's raci