American Entertainment History

The Provincetown Players created a revolution in American theatre, making room for truly modern approaches to playwriting, stage production, and performance. In Staging America, Jeffery Kennedy gives the unabridged story in a meticulously researched and comprehensive narrative that sheds new light on the history of the Provincetown Players. At the center of the study is an extensive account of the career of George Cram Cook, the Players' leader and artistic conscience, as well as one of the most significant facilitators of modernist writing in early twentieth-century American literature.

The First 60 Years: The History of Afro-American Musical Theater and Entertainment chronicles the contributions made by Black Americans to the entertainment industry in America from 1871 through 1930. This book describes, among other subjects, the types of traveling circuses performers worked on and the types of material performed there. This book also chronicles the history and the beginnings of Black Vaudeville in America, the creation of the blues, and the beginnings of Black theatrical entrepreneurship that took place in America during its most racist times.

Reagan's name is still relevant in American politics today, with every politician with an R next to his or her name trying to claim Ronald Reagan's conservative mantle. In the Republican presidential nomination debates in 2011, Reagan's name was invoked an average of over five times per debate, more than every other president combined. Meanwhile, Americans of all stripes continue to debate the merits of "Reaganomics" more than 30 years after Reagan was elected.

The host of the NBC Today Show’s popular segment shares his favorite stories of citizens making a difference around the country. For the six million people who watch the Emmy Award-winning "American Story with Bob Dotson" on NBC’s Today Show, Bob Dotson’s reports celebrate the inspirational stories of everyday Americans. Dotson has been crisscrossing the country for more than 40 years - logging more than four million miles - in search of people who have quietly but profoundly changed our lives and our counrty for the better.

Is theater really dead? Does the theater, as its champions insist, really provide a more intimate experience than film? If so, how have changes in cinematic techniques and technologies altered the relationship between stage and film? What are the inherent limitations of representing three-dimensional spaces in a two-dimensional one, and vice versa? American Drama in the Age of Film examines the strengths and weaknesses of both the dramatic and cinematic arts to confront the standard arguments in the film-versus-theater debate.

In this survey of eighteenth and nineteenth century American drama, Tice L. Miller examines American plays written before a canon was established in American dramatic literature and provides analyses central to the culture that produced them. Entertaining the Nation evaluates plays in the early years of the republic, reveals shifts in taste from the classical to the contemporary in the 1840s and 1850s, and considers the increasing influence of realism at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the 1920s and 1930s, as radio took over the pop music business, record companies were forced to leave their studios in major cities in search of new styles and markets. Ranging the mountains, prairies, rural villages, and urban ghettos of America, they discovered a wealth of unexpected talent - farmers, laborers, and ethnic minorities playing styles that blended the intertwining strands of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

In the majority of cases, a pop or rock fan who is asked about a particular celebrity will answer in unambiguous terms.

Americans have loved traveling circuses for generations, and none represents the country's love of entertainment quite like the most famous of them all, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Circus promoters have long been viewed as somewhat shady hucksters, but none could top Phineas Taylor Barnum, who used a blend of traditional circus entertainment, freak show exhibits, and outright hoaxes to create "The Greatest Show on Earth".

Biographers of Will Rogers are always faced with a tough task, because the list of things Will Rogers didn't do is a much shorter one than the list of things he did. By the time he died in 1935 in a plane crash in Alaska, he was one of the most famous men in the world and one of the most versatile celebrities. With a career spanning several decades and most of his life, Rogers not only dabbled in vaudeville, film, writing, and politics but reached the pinnacle of most of those professions, even if they were more like hobbies to him.

Few actresses lived their lives in the public eye more than Marilyn Monroe, and yet her life remains shrouded in mystery to this day. While it's common knowledge that Marilyn's life is a rags-to-riches story, her life is bookended by hazy details surrounding her early life and even more mysterious death.

Since the Battle of Little Bighorn, George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876) has possessed one of the most unique places in American history. Although he was a capable cavalry officer who served honorably during the Civil War, he remains one of the most instantly identifiable and famous military men in American history due to the fact he was killed during one of the country's most ignominious defeats, the Battle of Little Bighorn.

The origins of rock music claim several founding fathers, with each perspective holding merit and directly contributing to the golden age to follow in rock music. Perhaps the first and ultimately the most successful of this category - those artistic explorers who most effectively blurred racial and political lines through their music - was Chuck Berry.

After Baz Luhrmann’s movie, Elvis, hit theaters in the summer of 2022, audiences and critics alike couldn't help but question the Black origins of Elvis Presley’s music and style, reigniting a debate that has been circling for decades. In Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King​, author Preston Lauterbach answers these questions definitively, based on new research and extensive, previously unpublished interviews with the artists who blazed the way and the people who knew them.

Derided for its conformity and consumerism, 1950s America paid a price in anxiety. Prosperity existed under the shadow of a mushroom cloud. Optimism wore a Bucky Beaver smile that masked worry over threats at home and abroad. But even dread could not quell the revolutionary changes taking place in virtually every form of mainstream music. Music historian James Wierzbicki sheds light on how the Fifties' pervasive moods affected its sounds.

Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie examines the cultural and political significance of lyrics by beloved songwriter and activist Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie. The audiobook traces how Guthrie documented the history of America's poor and disadvantaged through lyrics about topics as diverse as the Dust Bowl and the poll tax. Divided into chapters covering specific historical topics such as race relations and lynchings, famous outlaws, and the Great Depression.

From its early amateur days played in the Corinthian Spirit, Preston North End's "Invincibles" of 1888 and great players like Stanley Matthews and Pelé, to the Premier League glory days of Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger, A History of Football is the story of the dominant teams, memorable occasions, and larger-than-life characters that shaped the game throughout its development. For all lovers of the beautiful game, this is an essential reference to its 150-year history.

In 1948, the Orioles, a Baltimore-based vocal group, recorded "It's Too Soon to Know". Combining the sound of Tin Pan Alley with gospel and blues sensibilities, the Orioles saw their first hit reach #13 on the pop charts, thus introducing the nation to vocal rhythm & blues and paving the way for the most successful groups of the 1950s. In the first scholarly treatment of this influential musical genre, Stuart Goosman chronicles the Orioles' story and that of myriad other black vocal groups in the postwar period.

Compelling from cover to cover, this is the story of one of the most recorded and beloved jazz trumpeters of all time. With unsparing honesty and a superb eye for detail, Clark Terry, born in 1920, takes us from his impoverished childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, where jazz could be heard everywhere, to the smoke-filled small clubs and carnivals across the Jim Crow South where he got his start, and on to worldwide acclaim.

Even 150 years later, we are haunted by the Civil War---by its division, its bloodshed, and perhaps, above all, by its origins. Today, many believe that the war was fought over slavery. This answer satisfies our contemporary sense of justice, but as Gary W. Gallagher shows in this brilliant revisionist history, it is an anachronistic judgment.