Download Free Vaudeville From The Honky Tonks To The Palace Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Vaudeville From The Honky Tonks To The Palace and write the review.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.
Covers vaudeville history from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960's with Jack Benny and George Burns and Bing Crosby.
This book tells the stories of the tender-hearted men who adopted stray cats from the cruel streets of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York. Its forty-two profiles introduce us to an array of remarkable men and extraordinary cats, including sports team mascots, artists' muses, and presidential pets.
This work offers a detailed history of American actors' attempts to unionize in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Actors' unions of this period faced a staggering amount of struggles, including a heavy industry reliance on the blacklist, severe media attacks on individual actors, and the frequent formation of illegitimate company unions. This work focuses specifically on the two main unions of the time, the White Rats Actors' Union of America and the Actors' Equity Association. The author chronicles the formation of the unions along with their achievements in the following decades and outlines the roles of union leaders Harry Mountford and Francis Wilson.
Like many western boomtowns at the turn of the twentieth century, Spokane, Washington, enjoyed a lively theatrical scene, ranging from plays, concerts, and operas to salacious variety and vaudeville shows. Yet even as Spokanites took pride in their city’s reputation as a “good show town,” the more genteel among them worried about its “Wild West” atmosphere. In Show Town, historian Holly George correlates the clash of tastes and sensibilities among Spokane’s theater patrons with a larger shift in values occurring throughout the Inland West—and the nation—during a period of rapid social change. George begins this multifaceted story in 1890, when two Spokane developers built the lavish Auditorium Theater as a kind of advertisement for the young city. The new venue catered to a class of people made wealthy by speculation, railroads, and mining. Yet the refined entertainment the Auditorium offered conflicted with the rollicking shows that played in the town’s variety theaters, designed to draw in the migratory workers—primarily single men—who provided labor for the same industries that made the fortunes of Spokane’s elite. As well-to-do Spokanites attempted to clamp down on the variety theaters, performances at even the city’s more respectable, “legitimate” playhouses began to reflect a movement away from Victorian sensibilities to a more modern desire for self-fulfillment—particularly among women. Theaters joined the debate over modern femininity by presenting plays on issues ranging from woman’s suffrage to shifting marital expectations. At the same time, national theater monopolies transmitted to the people of Spokane new styles and tastes that mirrored larger cultural trends. Lucidly written and meticulously researched, Show Town is a groundbreaking work of cultural history. By examining one city’s theatrical scene in all its complex dimensions, this book expands our understanding of the forces that shaped the urban American West.
Examines the social and historical significance of women’s contributions to American silent film comedy. For many people the term "silent comedy" conjures up images of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, Buster Keaton's Stoneface, or Harold Lloyd hanging precariously from the side of a skyscraper. Even people who have never seen a silent film can recognize these comedians at a glance. But what about the female comedians? Gale Henry, Louise Fazenda, Colleen Moore, Constance Talmadge—these and numerous others were wildly popular during the silent film era, appearing in countless motion pictures and earning top salaries, and yet their names have been almost entirely forgotten. As a consequence, recovering their history is all the more compelling given that they laid the foundation for generations of funny women, from Lucille Ball to Carol Burnett to Tina Fey. These women constitute an essential and neglected sector of film history, reflecting a turning point in women's social and political history. Their talent and brave spirit continues to be felt today, and Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in American Silent Film seeks to provide a better understanding of women's experiences in the early twentieth century and to better understand and appreciate the unruly and boundary-breaking women who have followed. The diversity and breadth of archival materials explored in Comic Venus illuminate the social and historical period of comediennes and silent film. In four sections, Kristen Anderson Wagner enumerates the relationship between women and comedy, beginning with the question of why historically women weren't seen as funny or couldn't possibly be funny in the public and male eye, a question that persists even today. Wagner delves into the idea of women's "delicate sensibilities," which presumably prevented them from being funny, and in chapter two traces ideas about feminine beauty and what a woman should express versus what these comedic women did express, as Wagner notes, "comediennes challenged the assumption that beauty was a fundamental component of ideal femininity." In chapter three, Wagner discusses how comediennes such as Clara Bow, Marie Dressler, and Colleen Moore used humor to gain recognition and power through performances of sexuality and desire. Women comedians presented "sexuality as fun and playful, suggesting that personal relationships could be fluid rather than stable." Chapter four examines silent comediennes' relationships to the modern world and argues that these women exemplified modernity and new womanhood. The final chapter of Comic Venus brings readers to understand comediennes and their impact on silent-era cinema, as well as their lasting influence on later generations of funny women. Comic Venus is the first book to explore the overlooked contributions made by comediennes in American silent film. Those with an interest in film and representations of femininity in comedy will be fascinated by the analytical connections and thoroughly researched histories of these women and their groundbreaking movements in comedy and stage.
Jewish humor, with its rational skepticism and cutting social criticism, permeates American popular culture. Scholars of humor--from Sigmund Freud to Woody Allen--have studied the essence of the Jewish joke, at once a defense mechanism against a hostile world and a means of cultural affirmation. Where did this wit originate? Why do Jewish humorists work at the margins of so many diverse cultures? What accounts for the longevity of the Jewish joke? Do oppressed people, as African American author Ralph Ellison suggested, slip their yoke when they change the joke? Citing examples from prominent humorists and stand-up comics, this book examines the phenomenon of Jewish humor from its biblical origins to its prevalence in the modern diaspora, revealing a mother lode of wit in language, literature, folklore, music and history.