The geographic range of this study is the British American colonies, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Savannah, in the Georgia colony on the continent, and the British West Indies."--BOOK JACKET.

Drawing upon newspapers, contemporary correspondence and diaries, playbills, and governmental documents, this volume presents a day-by-day calendar of every known performance by a professional or amateur company or solo performer and all related information from the beginning of the colonial period to the closing of the theaters at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in the October of 1774. This Calendar gathers together all of the known, existing material relating to the theaters, productions, and personnel of companies and individuals performing in the American colonies, reexamines all previously published primary evidence and claims, and offers extensive new information from sources unknown or unavailable to previous researchers, thus superceding all previous reference works on the subject.

In October of 1774, Congress passed a moral code which banned the theater, cock-fights, and horse races. In abiding by this code, Americans built for themselves a character as a virtuous people which set them apart from the "corrupt" British, prepared them to declare independence, and gave them the confidence to establish republican governments. This book uses the specific moral code of Congress as a springboard into the issues generated by the constitutional crisis that precipitated the American Revolution. Withington argues that the moral program, grounded in popular culture, worked as a political strategy to involve people emotionally in the cause and to broaden the reach of resistance to include all classes and both genders. Withington's integration of political history with the materials of popular culture, including cocker manuals, mortuary paraphernalia, prints, caricatures, anagrams, bawdy comedies and sentimental tragedies, and last speeches of condemned criminals leads the reader into a deeper understanding of the formation and significance of the revolutionary ideology