During the 1930s the Work Progress Administration funded the Federal Theater Project to sustain unemployed theatrical workers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major urban centers, employing over 12,000 people and presenting countless productions. Some of the most popular and memorable of these works, such as the "voodoo" Macbeth and the "swing" Mikado, were produced in the so-called Negro Units, whose story is narrated in this book. Particular focus is given to problems of representation in a community and in an era trying to define what was African American, what was Negro, what was American, what was peculiar, and what was universal in the arts.

In the 1930s, the Work Progress Administration funded a massive Federal Theatre Project in America's major urban centres, presenting hundreds of productions, some of the most popular and memorable of which were produced in the highly controversial and avant garde 'Negro Units'. This experiment in government-supported culture brought to the forefront one of the central problems in American democratic culture - the representation of racial difference. Those in the profession quickly discovered inescapable ideological responsibilities attending any sort of show, whether apparently entertaining or political in nature. Exploring the liberal idealism of the thirties and the critical debates in black journals over the role of an African American theatre, Fraden also looks at the obstacles facing black playwrights, audiences, and actors in a changing milieu.

This essential volume provides an overview of and introduction to African American writers and literary periods from their beginnings through the 21st century. This compact encyclopedia, aimed at students, selects the most important authors, literary movements, and key topics for them to know. Entries cover the most influential and highly regarded African American writers, including novelists, playwrights, poets, and nonfiction writers. The book covers key periods of African American literature—such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and the Civil Rights Era—and touches on the influence of the vernacular, including blues and hip hop. The volume provides historical context for critical viewpoints including feminism, social class, and racial politics. Entries are organized A to Z and provide biographies that focus on the contributions of key literary figures as well as overviews, background information, and definitions for key subjects.

Controversy erupted in spring 2001 when Chicago’s mostly white Southside Catholic Conference youth sports league rejected the application of the predominantly black St. Sabina grade school. Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, interracialism seemed stubbornly unattainable, and the national spotlight once again turned to the history of racial conflict in Catholic parishes. It’s widely understood that midcentury, working class, white ethnic Catholics were among the most virulent racists, but, as Crossing Parish Boundaries shows, that’s not the whole story. In this book, Timothy B. Neary reveals the history of Bishop Bernard Sheil’s Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), which brought together thousands of young people of all races and religions from Chicago’s racially segregated neighborhoods to take part in sports and educational programming. Tens of thousands of boys and girls participated in basketball, track and field, and the most popular sport of all, boxing, which regularly filled Chicago Stadium with roaring crowds. The history of Bishop Sheil and the CYO shows a cosmopolitan version of American Catholicism, one that is usually overshadowed by accounts of white ethnic Catholics aggressively resisting the racial integration of their working-class neighborhoods. By telling the story of Catholic-sponsored interracial cooperation within Chicago, Crossing Parish Boundaries complicates our understanding of northern urban race relations in the mid-twentieth century.

Angels in the American Theater: Patrons, Patronage, and Philanthropy examines the significant roles that theater patrons have played in shaping and developing theater in the United States. Because box office income rarely covers the cost of production, other sources are vital. Angels—financial investors and backers—have a tremendous impact on what happens on stage, often determining with the power and influence of their money what is conceived, produced, and performed. But in spite of their influence, very little has been written about these philanthropists. Composed of sixteen essays and fifteen illustrations, Angels in the American Theater explores not only how donors became angels but also their backgrounds, motivations, policies, limitations, support, and successes and failures. Subjects range from millionaires Otto Kahn and the Lewisohn sisters to foundation giants Ford, Rockefeller, Disney, and Clear Channel. The first book to focus on theater philanthropy, Angels in the American Theater employs both a historical and a chronological format and focuses on individual patrons, foundations, and corporations.

The New Deal era witnessed a surprising surge in popular engagement with the history and memory of the Civil War era. From the omnipresent book and film Gone with the Wind and the scores of popular theater productions to Aaron Copeland's "A Lincoln Portrait," it was hard to miss America's fascination with the war in the 1930s and 1940s. Nina Silber deftly examines the often conflicting and politically contentious ways in which Americans remembered the Civil War era during the years of the Depression, the New Deal, and World War II. In doing so, she reveals how the debates and events of that earlier period resonated so profoundly with New Deal rhetoric about state power, emerging civil rights activism, labor organizing and trade unionism, and popular culture in wartime. At the heart of this book is an examination of how historical memory offers people a means of understanding and defining themselves in the present. Silber reveals how, during a moment of enormous national turmoil, the events and personages of the Civil War provided a framework for reassessing national identity, class conflict, and racial and ethnic division. The New Deal era may have been the first time Civil War memory loomed so large for the nation as a whole, but, as the present moment suggests, it was hardly the last.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This collection of thirteen essays, edited by historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage, brings together original work from sixteen scholars in various disciplines, ranging from theater and literature to history and music, to address the complex roles of black performers, entrepreneurs, and consumers in American mass culture during the early twentieth century. Moving beyond the familiar territory of blackface and minstrelsy, these essays present a fresh look at the history of African Americans and mass culture. With subjects ranging from representations of race in sheet music illustrations to African American interest in Haitian culture, Beyond Blackface recovers the history of forgotten or obscure cultural figures and shows how these historical actors played a role in the creation of American mass culture. The essays explore the predicament that blacks faced at a time when white supremacy crested and innovations in consumption, technology, and leisure made mass culture possible. Underscoring the importance and complexity of race in the emergence of mass culture, Beyond Blackface depicts popular culture as a crucial arena in which African Americans struggled to secure a foothold as masters of their own representation and architects of the nation's emerging consumer society. The contributors are: Davarian L. Baldwin, Trinity College W. Fitzhugh Brundage, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Clare Corbould, University of Sydney Susan Curtis, Purdue University Stephanie Dunson, Williams College Lewis A. Erenberg, Loyola University Chicago Stephen Garton, University of Sydney John M. Giggie, University of Alabama Grace Elizabeth Hale, University of Virginia Robert Jackson, University of Tulsa David Krasner, Emerson College Thomas Riis, University of Colorado at Boulder Stephen Robertson, University of Sydney John Stauffer, Harvard University Graham White, University of Sydney Shane White, University of Sydney

Presents articles on the period known as the Harlem Renaissance, during which African American artists, poets, writers, thinkers, and musicians flourished in Harlem, New York.

The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism is the first wide-ranging anthology of theatre theory and dramatic criticism by women writers. Reproducing key primary documents contextualized by short essays, the collection situates women’s writing within, and also reframes the field’s male-defined and male-dominated traditions. Its collection of documents demonstrates women’s consistent and wide-ranging engagement with writing about theatre and performance and offers a more expansive understanding of the forms and locations of such theoretical and critical writing, dealing with materials that often lie outside established production and publication venues. This alternative tradition of theatre writing that emerges allows contemporary readers to form new ways of conceptualizing the field, bringing to the fore a long-neglected, vibrant, intelligent, deeply informed, and expanded canon that generates a new era of scholarship, learning, and artistry. The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatrical Theory and Dramatic Criticism is an important intervention into the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural History, while adding new dimensions to Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.