After the Civil War, a young tutor with a mysterious protector returns to the city she was born to search for a sister whom she has never met and instead finds herself amidst a wave of peculiar happenings including vampires. The home where she stays is strangely centered around too-well-behaved wayward children she must teach and a young woman whose father has mysteriously disappeared in search of a cure for her. This is the story of the search for the missing children of the Casquette Girls, a graphic photographic novel. This graphic novel is large as it has images, so please grab a cup of coffee while you wait!

Originally published: New York: FortheARTofit, 2012.

Pull up a chair or gather round the campfire and get ready for creepy tales of ghostly hauntings, eerie happenings, and other strange occurrences under the New Orleans skies. Whether read around the campfire on a dark and stormy night or from the backseat of the family van on the way to grandma's, this is a collection to treasure.

Operetta developed in the second half of the 19th century from the French opéra-comique and the more lighthearted German Singspiel. As the century progressed, the serious concerns of mainstream opera were sustained and intensified, leaving a gap between opéra-comique and vaudeville that necessitated a new type of stage work. Jacques Offenbach, son of a Cologne synagogue cantor, established himself in Paris with his series of opéras-bouffes. The popular success of this individual new form of entertainment light, humorous, satirical and also sentimental led to the emergence of operetta as a separate genre, an art form with its own special flavour and concerns, and no longer simply a "little opera". Attempts to emulate Offenbach's success in France and abroad generated other national schools of operetta and helped to establish the genre internationally, in Spain, in England, and especially in Austria Hungary. Here it inspired works by Franz von Suppé and Johann Strauss II (the Golden Age), and later Franz Lehár and Emmerich Kálmán (the Silver Age). Viennese operetta flourished conterminously with the Habsburg Empire and the mystique of Vienna, but, after the First World War, an artistically vibrant Berlin assumed this leading position (with Paul Lincke, Leon Jessel and Edouard Künnecke). As popular musical tastes diverged more and more during the interwar years, with the advent of new influences—like those of cabaret, the revue, jazz, modern dance music and the cinema, as well as changing social mores—the operetta genre took on new guises. This was especially manifested in the musical comedy of London's West End and New York's Broadway, with their imitators generating a success that opened a new golden age for the reinvented genre, especially after the Second World War. This source book presents an overview of the operetta genre in all its forms. The second volume provides a survey of the national schools of Germany, Spain, England, America, the Slavonic countries (especially Russia), Hungary, Italy and Greece. The principal composers are considered in chronological sequence, with biographical material and a list of stage works, selected synopses and some commentary. This volume also contains a discography and an index covering both volumes (general entries, singers and theatres).

Rida Johnson Young (ca. 1869-1926) was one of the most prolific female playwrights of her time, as well as a lyricist and librettist in the musical theater. She wrote more than thirty full-length plays, operettas, and musical comedies, 500 songs, and four novels, including Naughty Marietta, Lady Luxury, The Red Petticoat, and When Love is Young . Despite her extensive output, no significant study of her work has been produced. This book looks at her musical theater works with in-depth analyses of her librettos and lyrics, as well as her working relationships with other writers, performers, and producers, particularly Lee and J. J. Shubert. Using archival materials such as original typescripts, correspondence, and reviews, the book contextualizes her work in the early twentieth century professional theater and provides a window into the standard practices of writing and production of the era.

A New Orleans historian and vampire expert uncovers the historic origins of the Southern city’s vampire legends from colonial days to the Great Depression. New Orleans has a reputation as a home for creatures of the night. Popular books, movies and television shows have cemented the city's connection to vampires in the public imagination. But the stories of the Crescent City’s undead residents go much deeper than the tales of Sookie Stackhouse and The Vampire Lestat. In New Orleans Vampires, author Marita Woywod Crandle investigates the most haunting tales of vampirism in New Orleans history. In the early days of Louisiana's colonization, rumors swirled about the fate of the Casket Girls, a group of mysterious maidens traveling to the New World from France with peculiar casket-shaped boxes. The charismatic Comte St. Germain moved to the French Quarter in the early 1900s, eerily resembling a European aristocrat of one hundred years prior bearing the same name. In the 1930s, the Carter brothers terrorized the town with their desire to feed on living human blood. Strange but true tales mix with immortal legends in this fascinating volume.

For Surveys of Musical Theater, Music Appreciation courses and Popular Culture Surveys. This unique historical survey illustrates the interaction of multiple artistic and dramatic considerations with an overview of the development of numerous popular musical theater genres. This introduction provides more than a history of musical theater, it studies the music within the shows to provide an understanding of the contributions of musical theater composers as clearly as the artistry of musical theater lyricists and librettists. The familiarity of the musical helps students understand how music functions in a song and a show, while giving them the vocabulary to discuss their perceptions.

A collection of essays revealing how operetta spread across borders and became popular on the musical stages of the world.

This book examines ‘Southern Gothic’ - a term that describes some of the finest works of the American Imagination. But what do ‘Southern’ and ‘Gothic’ mean, and how are they related? Traditionally seen as drawing on the tragedy of slavery and loss, ‘Southern Gothic’ is now a richer, more complex subject. Thirty-five distinguished scholars explore the Southern Gothic, under the categories of Poe and his Legacy; Space and Place; Race; Gender and Sexuality; and Monsters and Voodoo. The essays examine slavery and the laws that supported it, and stories of slaves who rebelled and those who escaped. Also present are the often-neglected issues of the Native American presence in the South, socioeconomic class, the distinctions among the several regions of the South, same-sex relationships, and norms of gendered behaviour. This handbook covers not only iconic figures of Southern literature but also other less well-known writers, and examines gothic imagery in film and in contemporary television programmes such as True Blood and True Detective.

"[These volumes] are endlessly absorbing as an excursion into cultural history and national memory."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.