Download or read book Richard Potter written by John A. Hodgson and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apart from a handful of exotic--and almost completely unreliable--tales surrounding his life, Richard Potter is almost unknown today. Two hundred years ago, however, he was the most popular entertainer in America--the first showman, in fact, to win truly nationwide fame. Working as a magician and ventriloquist, he personified for an entire generation what a popular performer was and made an invaluable contribution to establishing popular entertainment as a major part of American life. His story is all the more remarkable in that Richard Potter was also a black man. This was an era when few African Americans became highly successful, much less famous. As the son of a slave, Potter was fortunate to have opportunities at all. At home in Boston, he was widely recognized as black, but elsewhere in America audiences entertained themselves with romantic speculations about his "Hindu" ancestry (a perception encouraged by his act and costumes). Richard Potter’s performances were enjoyed by an enormous public, but his life off stage has always remained hidden and unknown. Now, for the first time, John A. Hodgson tells the remarkable, compelling--and ultimately heartbreaking--story of Potter’s life, a tale of professional success and celebrity counterbalanced by racial vulnerability in an increasingly hostile world. It is a story of race relations, too, and of remarkable, highly influential black gentlemanliness and respectability: as the unsung precursor of Frederick Douglass, Richard Potter demonstrated to an entire generation of Americans that a black man, no less than a white man, could exemplify the best qualities of humanity. The apparently trivial "popular entertainment" status of his work has long blinded historians to his significance and even to his presence. Now at last we can recognize him as a seminal figure in American history.
Download or read book The Drama of Celebrity written by Sharon Marcus and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do so many people care so much about celebrities? Who decides who gets to be a star? What are the privileges and pleasures of fandom? Do celebrities ever deserve the outsized attention they receive? In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive dupes. Instead, journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves all compete, passionately and expertly, to shape the stories we tell about celebrities and fans. The result: a high-stakes drama as endless as it is unpredictable. Drawing on scrapbooks, personal diaries, and vintage fan mail, Marcus traces celebrity culture back to its nineteenth-century roots, when people the world over found themselves captivated by celebrity chefs, bad-boy poets, and actors such as the "divine" Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), as famous in her day as the Beatles in theirs. Known in her youth for sleeping in a coffin, hailed in maturity as a woman of genius, Bernhardt became a global superstar thanks to savvy engagement with her era's most innovative media and technologies: the popular press, commercial photography, and speedy new forms of travel. Whether you love celebrity culture or hate it, The Drama of Celebrity will change how you think about one of the most important phenomena of modern times.
Download or read book Lady Romeo written by Tana Wojczuk and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction Finalist for the Marfield Prize For fans of Book of Ages and American Eve, this “lively, illuminating new biography” (The Boston Globe) of 19th-century queer actress Charlotte Cushman portrays a “brisk, beautifully crafted life” (Stacy Schiff, bestselling author of The Witches and Cleopatra) that riveted New York City and made headlines across America. All her life, Charlotte Cushman refused to submit to others’ expectations. Raised in Boston at the time of the transcendentalists, a series of disasters cleared the way for her life on the stage—a path she eagerly took, rejecting marriage and creating a life of adventure, playing the role of the hero in and out of the theater as she traveled to New Orleans and New York City, and eventually to London and back to build a successful career. Her Hamlet, Romeo, Lady Macbeth, and Nancy Sykes from Oliver Twist became canon, impressing Louisa May Alcott, who later based a character on her in Jo’s Boys, and Walt Whitman, who raved about “the towering grandeur of her genius” in his columns for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She acted alongside Edwin and John Wilkes Booth—supposedly giving the latter a scar on his neck that was later used to identify him as President Lincoln’s assassin—and visited frequently with the Great Emancipator himself, who was a devoted Shakespeare fan and admirer of Cushman’s work. Her wife immortalized her in the angel at the top of Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain; worldwide, she was “a lady universally acknowledged as the greatest living tragic actress.” Behind the scenes, she was equally radical, making an independent income, supporting her family, creating one of the first bohemian artists’ colonies abroad, and living publicly as a queer woman. And yet, her name has since faded into the shadows. Now, her story comes to brilliant life with Tana Wojczuk’s Lady Romeo, an exhilarating and enlightening biography of the 19th-century trailblazer. With new research and rarely seen letters and documents, Wojczuk reconstructs the formative years of Cushman’s life, set against the excitement and drama of 1800s New York City and featuring a cast of luminaries and revolutionaries who changed the cultural landscape of America forever. The story of an astonishing and uniquely American life, Lady Romeo reveals one of the most remarkable forgotten figures in our history and restores her to center stage, where she belongs.
Download or read book A Short History of Celebrity written by Fred Inglis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of celebrity from Byron to Beckham Love it or hate it, celebrity is one of the dominant features of modern life—and one of the least understood. Fred Inglis sets out to correct this problem in this entertaining and enlightening social history of modern celebrity, from eighteenth-century London to today's Hollywood. Vividly written and brimming with fascinating stories of figures whose lives mark important moments in the history of celebrity, this book explains how fame has changed over the past two-and-a-half centuries. Starting with the first modern celebrities in mid-eighteenth-century London, including Samuel Johnson and the Prince Regent, the book traces the changing nature of celebrity and celebrities through the age of the Romantic hero, the European fin de siècle, and the Gilded Age in New York and Chicago. In the twentieth century, the book covers the Jazz Age, the rise of political celebrities such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, and the democratization of celebrity in the postwar decades, as actors, rock stars, and sports heroes became the leading celebrities. Arguing that celebrity is a mirror reflecting some of the worst as well as some of the best aspects of modern history itself, Inglis considers how the lives of the rich and famous provide not only entertainment but also social cohesion and, like morality plays, examples of what—and what not—to do. This book will interest anyone who is curious about the history that lies behind one of the great preoccupations of our lives. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
Download or read book Twenty First Century Celebrity written by David C. Giles and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Giles examines digital culture’s impact on established celebrities from traditional media while charting the rise of new forms of celebrity such as vloggers and influencers, offering novel insights on topics such as parasocial relationships, micro-celebrity, memes and celetoids.
Download or read book Cl o de M rode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture written by Michael D. Garval and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language monograph on the French dancer and model, Cléo de Mérode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture explores the haunting legacy of this intriguing and glamorous figure, an international celebrity at the dawn of our star-struck modernity. Situating Mérode at a pivotal moment in the history of fame and visual culture, this study probes the neglected prehistory of a visual culture obsessed with celebrities and their images.
Download or read book Celebrity Across the Channel 1750 1850 written by Anaïs Pédron and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-23 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrity Across the Channel, 1750-1850 is the first book to study and compare the concept of celebrity in France and Britain from 1750 to 1850 as the two countries transformed into the states we recognize today. It offers a transnational perspective by placing in dialogue the growing fields of celebrity studies in the two countries, especially by engaging with Antoine Lilti’s seminal work, The Invention of Celebrity, translated into English in 2017. With contributions from a diverse range of scholarly cultures, the volume has a firmly interdisciplinary scope over the time period 1750 to 1850, which was an era marked by social, political, and cultural upheaval. Bringing together the fields of history, politics, literature, theater studies, and musicology, the volume employs a firmly interdisciplinary scope to explore an era marked by social, political, and cultural upheaval. The organization of the collection allows for new readings of the similarities and differences in the understanding of celebrity in Britain and France. Consequently, the volume builds upon the questions that are currently at the heart of celebrity studies.
Download or read book Carrying All Before Her written by Chelsea Phillips and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carrying All Before Her recovers the stories of six eighteenth-century celebrity actresses who performed during pregnancy, melding public and private, persona and person, domestic and professional labor and helping to shape wider social, medical, and political conversations about gender, sexuality, pregnancy, and motherhood. Their stories deepen our understanding of celebrity, repertory, and theatre's connection to a wider social world, and challenge notions of women's agency and power in and beyond the professional theatre.
Download or read book Celebrity Politics written by Mark Wheeler and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new book, Mark Wheeler offers the first in-depth analysis of the history, nature and global reach of celebrity politics today. Celebrity politicians and politicized celebrities have had a profound impact upon the practice of politics and the way in which it is now communicated. New forms of political participation have emerged as a result and the political classes have increasingly absorbed the values of celebrity into their own PR strategies. Celebrity activists, endorsers, humanitarians and diplomats also play a part in reconfiguring politics for a more fragmented and image-conscious public arena. In academic circles, celebrity may be viewed as a ‘manufactured product’; one fabricated by media exposure so that celebrity activists are no more than ‘bards of the powerful.’ Mark Wheeler, however, provides a more nuanced critique contending that both celebrity politicians and politicized stars should be defined by their ‘affective capacity’ to operate within the public sphere. This timely book will be a valuable resource for students of media and communication studies and political science as well as general readers keen to understand the nature and reach of contemporary celebrity culture.
Download or read book Celebrity Culture and the American Dream written by Karen Sternheimer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, Second Edition considers how major economic and historical factors shaped the nature of celebrity culture as we know it today, retaining the first edition’s examples from the first celebrity fan magazines of 1911 to the present and expanding to include updated examples and additional discussion on the role of the internet and social media in today’s celebrity culture. Equally important, the book explains how and why the story of Hollywood celebrities matters, sociologically speaking, to an understanding of American society, to the changing nature of the American Dream, and to the relation between class and culture. This book is an ideal addition to courses on inequalities, celebrity culture, media, and cultural studies.
Download or read book The Invention of Celebrity written by Antoine Lilti and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frequently perceived as a characteristic of modern culture, the phenomenon of celebrity has much older roots. In this book Antoine Lilti shows that the mechanisms of celebrity were developed in Europe during the Enlightenment, well before films, yellow journalism, and television, and then flourished during the Romantic period on both sides of the Atlantic. Figures from across the arts like Voltaire, Garrick, and Liszt were all veritable celebrities in their time, arousing curiosity and passionate loyalty from their “fans.” The rise of the press, new advertising techniques, and the marketing of leisure brought a profound transformation in the visibility of celebrities: private lives were now very much on public show. Nor was politics spared this cultural upheaval: Marie-Antoinette, George Washington, and Napoleon all experienced a political world transformed by the new demands of celebrity. And when the people suddenly appeared on the revolutionary scene, it was no longer enough to be legitimate; it was crucial to be popular too. Lilti retraces the profound social upheaval precipitated by the rise of celebrity and explores the ambivalence felt toward this new phenomenon. Both sought after and denounced, celebrity evolved as the modern form of personal prestige, assuming the role that glory played in the aristocratic world in a new age of democracy and evolving forms of media. While uncovering the birth of celebrity in the eighteenth century, Lilti's perceptive history at the same time shines light on the continuing importance of this phenomenon in today’s world.
Download or read book Understanding Celebrity written by Graeme Turner and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2004-05-07 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: `Graeme Turner is one of the leading figures in cultural studies today. When his gaze turns to celebrity, the result is a readable and compelling account of this most perplexing and infuriating of modern phenomena. Read on!' - Toby Miller, New York University We cannot escape celebrity culture: it is everywhere. So just what is the cultural function of celebrity? This is the first comprehensive overview of the production and consumption of celebrity from within cultural and media studies. The pervasive influence of contemporary celebrity, and the cultures it produces, has been widely noticed. Earlier studies, though, have tended to focus on the consumption of celebrity or on particular locations of celebrity - Hollywood, or the sports industries for instance. This book presents a broad survey across all media as well as a new synthesis of theoretical positions, that will be welcomed by all students of media and cultural studies. Among its attributes are the following: -It provides an overview and evaluation of the key debates surrounding the definition of celebrity, its history, and its social and cultural function -It examines the 'celebrity industries’: the PR and publicity structures that manufacture celebrity -It looks at the cultural processes through which celebrity is consumed -It draws examples from the full range of contemporary media - film, television, newspapers, magazines and the web
Download or read book The First Celebrity Serial Killer in Southwest Ohio written by Richard O Jones and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-04 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life, crimes, and rise to fame of Alfred Knapp, “The Strangler,” from the award-winning journalist and author of Cincinnati’s Savage Seamstress. Just before Christmas 1902, Alfred Knapp strangled his wife in her sleep. He put her body in a box and sent the box floating down the Great Miami River, telling everyone that Hannah had left him. When the truth came out, Knapp confessed to four other murders. Newspapers across the Midwest sent reporters to interview the handsome strangler. Despite spending most of his adulthood in prison, he had a charming, boyish manner that made him an instant celebrity serial killer. True crime historian Richard O. Jones examines the strangler’s alleged crimes, the family drama of covering up Knapp’s atrocities and how a brain-damaged drifter became a media darling. Includes photos
Download or read book Constructing Charisma written by Edward Berenson and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Railroads, telegraphs, lithographs, photographs, and mass periodicals--the major technological advances of the 19th century seemed to diminish the space separating people from one another, creating new and apparently closer, albeit highly mediated, social relationships. Nowhere was this phenomenon more evident than in the relationship between celebrity and fan, leader and follower, the famous and the unknown. By mid-century, heroes and celebrities constituted a new and powerful social force, as innovations in print and visual media made it possible for ordinary people to identify with the famous; to feel they knew the hero, leader, or "star"; to imagine that public figures belonged to their private lives. This volume examines the origins and nature of modern mass media and the culture of celebrity and fame they helped to create. Crossing disciplines and national boundaries, the book focuses on arts celebrities (Sarah Bernhardt, Byron and Liszt); charismatic political figures (Napoleon and Wilhelm II); famous explorers (Stanley and Brazza); and celebrated fictional characters (Cyrano de Bergerac).
Download or read book Celebrity in Chief written by Kenneth T. Walsh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It didn t take long for Barack Obama to make his mark as the biggest political star to ever occupy the White House. Over the course of his two terms in office, Obama has injected the American presidency deeper into popular culture than any of his predecessors. He and his wife Michelle have become iconic figures, celebrities of the first order.This book, by award-winning White House correspondent and presidential historian Kenneth T. Walsh, discusses how the Obamas reached this point. More important, it takes a detailed and comprehensive look at the history of America s presidents as celebrities in chief since the beginning of the Republic. Walsh makes the point that modern presidents need to be celebrities and build on their fame in order to propel their agendas and rally public support for themselves as national leaders so that they can get things done.Combining incisive historical analysis with a journalist s eye for detail, this book looks back to such presidents as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as the forerunners of contemporary celebrity presidents. It examines modern presidents including Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt, each of whom qualified as a celebrity in his own time and place. The book also looks at presidents who fell short in their star appeal, such as George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson, and explains why their star power was lacking.Among the special features of the book are detailed profiles of the presidents and how they measured up or failed as celebrities; an historical analysis of America s popular culture and how presidents have played a part in it, from sports and television to movies and the news media; the role of first ladies; and a portfolio of fascinating photos illustrating the intersection of the presidency with popular culture."
Download or read book Cooking for Kings written by Ian Kelly and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2005-09-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A recipe-enhanced profile of one of history's most prolific culinary writers draws on the subject's memoirs to trace his rise from Paris orphan to international celebrity, a journey during which he traveled throughout Europe and Russia and prepared sumptuous feasts for royal families. Reprint.
Download or read book The Strange Genius of Mr O written by Carolyn Eastman and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-12-11 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as Mr. O, counting the nation's leading politicians and intellectuals among his admirers. And then, like so many meteoric American luminaries afterward, he fell from grace. The Strange Genius of Mr. O is at once the biography of a remarkable performer--a gaunt Scottish orator who appeared in a toga--and a story of the United States during the founding era. Ogilvie's career featured many of the hallmarks of celebrity we recognize from later eras: glamorous friends, eccentric clothing, scandalous religious views, narcissism, and even an alarming drug habit. Yet he captivated audiences with his eloquence and inaugurated a golden age of American oratory. Examining his roller-coaster career and the Americans who admired (or hated) him, this fascinating book renders a vivid portrait of the United States in the midst of invention.
