"Liberty Theater by Rosalind Fox Solomon brings together her photographs made in the Southern United States from the 1970s to 1990s, never before published together as a group. Solomon's images depict a complex terrain of social and emotional issues inherited over generations: a world of class and gender divisions, implied and overt racism, competing notions of liberty, and lurking violence. Journeying through Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South California, Solomon draws attention to cultural idiosyncrasies, paradoxes and theatrical displays: a Daughter of the Confederacy sits in costume with a china doll from her collection; a dead tree stump, fenced and suspended with wires is elevated to the status of a Civil War monument; African American boys examine a vitrine of guns as two white police manikins loom behind them. Poised between act and re-enactment, the animate and the inanimate, Solomon's images reveal how history becomes a vernacular performance and identity a form of theatre.--

How popular theater, including blackface characters, reflected and influenced attitudes toward race, the slave trade, and ideas of liberty in early America. Jenna M. Gibbs explores the world of theatrical and related print production on both sides of the Atlantic in an age of remarkable political and social change. Her deeply researched study of working-class and middling entertainment covers the period of the American Revolution through the first half of the nineteenth century, examining controversies over the place of black people in the Anglo-American moral imagination. Taking a transatlantic and nearly century-long view, Performing the Temple of Liberty draws on a wide range of performed texts as well as ephemera—broadsides, ballads, and cartoons—and traces changes in white racial attitudes. Gibbs asks how popular entertainment incorporated and helped define concepts of liberty, natural rights, the nature of blackness, and the evils of slavery while also generating widespread acceptance, in America and in Great Britain, of blackface performance as a form of racial ridicule. Readers follow the migration of theatrical texts, images, and performers between London and Philadelphia. The story is not flattering to either the United States or Great Britain. Gibbs's account demonstrates how British portrayals of Africans ran to the sympathetic and to a definition of liberty that produced slave manumission in 1833 yet reflected an increasingly racialized sense of cultural superiority. On the American stage, the treatment of blacks devolved into a denigrating, patronizing view embedded both in blackface burlesque and in the idea of "Liberty," the figure of the white goddess. Performing the Temple of Liberty will appeal to readers across disciplinary lines of history, literature, theater history, and culture studies. Scholars and students interested in slavery and abolition, British and American politics and culture, and Atlantic history will also take an interest in this provocative work.

Dotty's life in Sterno with her husband Hamel is absolutely perfect! It's a fairy tale, it really is. True, in their seven years of marriage Hamel has forbidden her to leave their tiny apartment or speak to anyone, but Dotty is so very happy to spend her days watching video re-enactments of the day they first met. When a phone call from a mysterious woman threatens to tear her world asunder, Dotty must venture out into the vast city of Sterno, and try to discover what it is to be a "real" woman.

Most of the time, there is nothing remarkable about a movie theater today; but that wasn't always the case. When the great American movie palaces began opening in the early 20th century, they were some of the most lavish, stunning buildings ever seen. However, they wouldn't last -- with the advent of in-home television, theater companies found it harder and harder to keep them open. Some were demolished, some were converted, and some remain empty to this day. After the Final Curtain: The Fall of the American Movie Theatre will take you through 24 of these magnificent buildings, revealing the beauty that remains years after the last ticket was sold.

In Search of Liberty explores how African Americans, since the founding of the United States, have understood their struggles for freedom as part of the larger Atlantic world. The essays in this volume capture the pursuits of equality and justice by African Americans across the Atlantic World through the end of the nineteenth century, as their fights for emancipation and enfranchisement in the United States continued. This book illuminates stories of individual Black people striving to escape slavery in places like Nova Scotia, Louisiana, and Mexico and connects their eff orts to emigration movements from the United States to Africa and the Caribbean, as well as to Black abolitionist campaigns in Europe. By placing these diverse stories in conversation, editors Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene have curated a larger story that is only beginning to be told. By focusing on Black internationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, In Search of Liberty reveals that Black freedom struggles in the United States were rooted in transnational networks much earlier than the better-known movements of the twentieth century.

Famous for its lush beauty and inviting beaches, Hawai'i also boasts a rich theatrical history dating back to the mid-19th century and spanning its years as a kingdom, U.S. territory, and a state. Its warm, tropical climate and social, cultural, and ethnic diversity contributed to the variety of theatres unique to the islands--from simple, rural plantation theatres on the neighbor islands, to neighborhood movie houses in exotic styles, to an incomparable tropical moderne jewel near the beach at Waikiki. Most of these theatres are now just a memory, except for those few saved by dedicated individuals and restored for another life. This book celebrates the rich history of these theatrical venues through rare archival photographs and little-known details.