Download or read book Catalog of Copyright Entries written by Library of Congress. Copyright Office and published by . This book was released on 1918 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book When Broadway Was the Runway written by Marlis Schweitzer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-08-19 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 When Broadway Was the Runway explores the central and largely unacknowledged role of commercial Broadway theater in the birth of modern American fashion and consumer culture. Long before Hollywood's red carpet spectacles, Broadway theater introduced American women to the latest styles. At the beginning of the twentieth century, theater impresarios captured the imagination of their largely female patrons by transforming the stage into a glorious site of consumer spectacle. Theater historian Marlis Schweitzer examines how these impresarios presented the dresses actresses wore onstage, as well as the jewelry and hairstyles they chose, as commodities that were available for purchase in nearby department stores and salons. The Merry Widow Hat, designed for the hit operetta of the same name, sparked an international craze, and the dancer Irene Castle became a fashion celebrity when she anticipated the flapper look of the 1920s by nearly a decade. Not only were the latest styles onstage, but advertisements appeared throughout theaters, in programs, and on the curtains, while magazines such as Vogue vied for the rights to publish theatrical costume sketches and Harper's Bazar enticed readers with photo spreads of actresses in couture. This combination of spectatorship and consumption was a crucial step in the formation of a mass market for consumer goods and the rise of the cult of celebrity. Through historical analysis and dozens of early photographs and illustrations, Schweitzer aims a spotlight at the cultural and economic convergence of the theater and fashion industries in the United States.

Download or read book Catalogue of Title entries of Books and Other Articles Entered in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington Under the Copyright Law Wherein the Copyright Has Been Completed by the Deposit of Two Copies in the Office written by Library of Congress. Copyright Office and published by . This book was released on 1918 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Winnie Lightner written by David L. Lightner and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2016-12-14 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winnie Lightner (1899–1971) stood out as the first great female comedian of the talkies. Blessed with a superb singing voice and a gift for making wisecracks and rubber faces, she rose to stardom in vaudeville and on Broadway. Then, at the dawn of the sound era, she became the first person in motion picture history to have her spoken words, the lyrics to a song, censored. In Winnie Lightner: Tomboy of the Talkies, David L. Lightner shows how Winnie Lightner's hilarious performance in the 1929 musical comedy Gold Diggers of Broadway made her an overnight sensation. She went on to star in seven other Warner Bros. features. In the best of them, she was the comic epitome of a strident feminist, dominating men and gleefully spurning conventional gender norms and moral values. So tough was she, the studio billed her as “the tomboy of the talkies.” When the Great Depression rendered moviegoers hostile toward feminism, Warner Bros. tried to craft a new image of her as glamorous and sexy. Executives assigned her contradictory roles in which she was empowered in the workplace but submissive to her male partner at home. The new persona flopped at the box office, and Lightner's stardom ended. In four final movies, she played supporting roles as the loudmouthed roommate and best friend of actresses Loretta Young, Joan Crawford, and Mona Barrie. Following her retirement in 1934, Lightner faded into obscurity. Many of her films were damaged or even lost entirely. At long last, this biography gives Winnie Lightner the recognition she deserves as a notable figure in film history, in women's history, and in the history of show business.

Download or read book Marie Dressler written by Matthew Kennedy and published by McFarland. This book was released on 1999 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early in the century, Marie Dressler was hailed as one of America's finest comics, with a 20-year string of Broadway and vaudeville successes including The Lady Slavey, Miss Prinnt, Higgledy Piggledy, The Man in the Moon, and Tillie's Nightmare. She starred with Charlie Chaplin in the first ever feature-length comedy Tillie's Punctured Romance and later in Min and Bill for which she won an Academy Award. A brilliant comedienne in body, timing, inflection and reactions, her talents far exceeded the expectations of slapstick, and her movies earned sums far greater than those of Garbo, or Harlow, or even Gable. This work examines Dressler's life from vaudeville to talkies. Based on extensive research and interviews with Dressler's surviving friends, co-stars and colleagues, including Maureen O'Sullivan, Jackie Cooper and Anita Page, it details her public and personal successes and failures. A listing of her stage appearances, vocal recordings and films is included.

Download or read book Eddie Foy written by Armond Fields and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just a century ago Eddie Foy was the consummate stage comedian. A versatile performer, Foy contributed to the development of popular theater from the Civil War to the Roaring Twenties, from poverty-inspired Irish two-acts to lavish musical comedies. This first-ever biography of Foy tells the story of his indigent childhood in New York's Bowery and in Chicago, his tough uphill climb as a "variety artist" at Western outposts, his success in vaudeville and Broadway, and his arrival as a national icon with the Seven Little Foys. Foy's career mirrored the growth of popular theater entertainment in America. Exhaustively researched, this work contains many rare personal photographs from the Foy family archives.

Download or read book Film History Through Trade Journal Art 1916 1920 written by Jeff Codori and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period in film history between the regimentation of the Edison Trust and the vertical integration of the Studio System--roughly 1916 through 1920--was a time of structural and artistic experimentation for the American film industry. As the nature of the industry was evolving, society around it was changing as well; arts, politics and society were in a state of flux between old and new. Before the major studios dominated the industry, droves of smaller companies competed for the attention of the independent exhibitor, their gateway to the movie-goer. Their arena was in the pages of the trade press, and their weapons were their advertisements, often bold and eye-catching. The reporting of the trade journals, as they witnessed the evolution of the industry from its infancy towards the future, is the basis of this history. Pulled from the pages of the journals themselves as archived by the Media History Digital Library, the observations of the trade press writers are accompanied by cleaned and restored advertisements used in the battle among the young film companies. They offer a unique and vital look at this formative period of film history.

Download or read book A Guide to Critical Reviews written by James M. Salem and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Game of Inches written by Peter Morris and published by Ivan R. Dee. This book was released on 2006-03-23 with total page 663 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating and charming encyclopedic collection of baseball firsts, describing how the innovations in the game—in rules, equipment, styles of play, strategies, etc.—occurred and developed from its origins to the present day. The book relies heavily on quotations from contemporary sources.

Download or read book My Melancholy Baby written by Michael G. Garber and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-06-28 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2022 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence—Certificate of Merit in the category of Best Historical Research in Recorded Rock and Popular Music Ten songs, from “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” (1902) to “You Made Me Love You” (1913), ignited the development of the classic pop ballad. In this exploration of how the style of the Great American Songbook evolved, Michael G. Garber unveils the complicated, often-hidden origins of these enduring, pioneering works. He riffs on colorful stories that amplify the rising of an American folk art composed by innovators both famous and obscure. Songwriters, and also the publishers, arrangers, and performers, achieved together a collective genius that moved hearts worldwide to song. These classic ballads originated all over the nation—Louisiana, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan—and then the Tin Pan Alley industry, centered in New York, made the tunes unforgettable sensations. From ragtime to bop, cabaret to radio, new styles of music and modes for its dissemination invented and reinvented the intimate, personal American love ballad, creating something both swinging and tender. Rendered by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and a host of others, recordings and movies carried these songs across the globe. Using previously underexamined sources, Garber demonstrates how these songs shaped the music industry and the lives of ordinary Americans. Besides covering famous composers like Irving Berlin, this history also introduces such little-known figures as Maybelle Watson, who had to sue to get credit and royalties for creating the central content of the lyric for “My Melancholy Baby.” African American Frank Williams contributed to the seminal “Some of These Days” but was forgotten for decades. The ten ballads explored here permanently transformed American popular song.

Download or read book Candy Cummings written by Stephen Robert Katz and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the greatest pitchers of his era, William Arthur "Candy" Cummings was born in 1848, when baseball was in its infancy. In the 1870s, Candy's invention, the curveball, played a transformative role and earned him a place in the Hall of Fame. Drawing on extensive research, this first full-length biography traces Candy's New England heritage and chronicles his rise to the top, from pitching for amateur teams in mid-1860s Brooklyn to playing in the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players--the first major league--and then the newly-formed National League. A critical examination of the evidence and competing claims reveals that Cummings was, indeed, the originator of the curveball.

Download or read book Staging America written by Jeffery Kennedy and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2023-01-24 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive history of the Provincetown Players and their influence on modern American theatre The Provincetown Players created a revolution in American theatre, making room for truly modern approaches to playwriting, stage production, and performance unlike anything that characterized the commercial theatre of the early twentieth century. In Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players, Jeffery Kennedy gives readers the unabridged story in a meticulously researched and comprehensive narrative that sheds new light on the history of the Provincetown Players. This study draws on many new sources that have only become available in the last three decades; this new material modifies, refutes, and enhances many aspects of previous studies. 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 and theatre. It traces Cook’s mission of “cultural patriotism,” which drove him toward creating a uniquely American identity in theatre. Kennedy also focuses on the group of friends he calls the “Regulars,” perhaps the most radical collection of minds in America at the time; they encouraged Cook to launch the Players in Provincetown in the summer of 1915 and instigated the move to New York City in fall 1916. Kennedy has paid particular attention to the many legends connected to the group (such as the “discovery” of Eugene O’Neill), and also adds to the biographical record of the Players’ forty-seven playwrights, including Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, Rita Wellman, Mike Gold, Djuna Barnes, and John Reed. Kennedy also examines other fascinating artistic, literary, and historical personalities who crossed the Players’ paths, including Emma Goldman, Charles Demuth, Berenice Abbott, Sophie Treadwell, Theodore Dreiser, Claudette Colbert, and Charlie Chaplin. Kennedy highlights the revolutionary nature of those living in bohemian Greenwich Village who were at the heart of the Players and the America they were responding to in their plays.

Download or read book The Mummy on Screen written by Basil Glynn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mummy is one of the most recognizable figures in horror and is as established in the popular imagination as virtually any other monster, yet the Mummy on screen has until now remained a largely overlooked figure in critical analysis of the cinema. In this compelling new study, Basil Glynn explores the history of the Mummy film, uncovering lost and half-forgotten movies along the way, revealing the cinematic Mummy to be an astonishingly diverse and protean figure with a myriad of on-screen incarnations. In the course of investigating the enduring appeal of this most 'Oriental' of monsters, Glynn traces the Mummy's development on screen from its roots in popular culture and silent cinema, through Universal Studios' Mummy movies of the 1930s and 40s, to Hammer Horror's re-imagining of the figure in the 1950s, and beyond.

Download or read book Selling Baseball written by Jeffrey Orens and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2025-02-04 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating look back on baseball’s humble beginnings and its transformation into the national pastime, told through the lives of two men who dominated the game. The nineteenth century was a time of rapid growth and development for the game of “base ball,” and players George Wright and Albert Spalding were right in the thick of it. These two young men, the first superstars of the professional game, won the hearts of a country in search of a unifying spirit after a devastating civil war. Selling Baseball: How Superstars George Wright and Albert Spalding Impacted Sports in America breathes fresh energy into baseball’s beginnings with this captivating tale of two vibrant personalities whose friendly rivalry was integral to the rise of the professional game. While they came from starkly different backgrounds—Albert was a young, gangly pitcher from the country’s rural heartland and George the consummate athlete from the New York City area—their captivating performances on the field, along with their promotion of the game and of sports equipment, fed the public’s insatiable appetite for leisure-time pursuits and helped grow professional baseball to unprecedented heights. George Wright and Albert Spalding’s stories are masterfully woven together to paint a sweeping picture of the early days of professional baseball, the evolution of sports as a business, and the advancement of sports equipment and the sporting goods industry. Their rise as players and businessmen mirrored the rise of a nation that would lead the world in the coming century.

Download or read book How the Few Became the Proud written by Heather Venable and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than half of its existence, members of the Marine Corps largely self-identified as soldiers. It did not yet mean something distinct to be a Marine, either to themselves or to the public at large. As neither a land-based organization like the Army nor an entirely sea-based one like the Navy, the Corps' missions overlapped with both institutions. This work argues that the Marine Corps could not and would not settle on a mission, and therefore it turned to an image to ensure its institutional survival. The process by which a maligned group of nineteenth-century naval policemen began to consider themselves to be elite warriors benefited from the active engagement of Marine officers with the Corps' historical record as justification for its very being. Rather than look forward and actively seek out a mission that could secure their existence, late nineteenth-century Marines looked backward and embraced the past. They began to justify their existence by invoking their institutional traditions, their many martial engagements, and their claim to be the nation's oldest and proudest military institution. This led them to celebrate themselves as superior to soldiers and sailors. Although there are countless works on this hallowed fighting force, How the Few Became the Proud is the first to explore how the Marine Corps crafted such powerful myths.

Download or read book Blue Vaudeville written by Andrew L. Erdman and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work reveals the often racy, ribald, and sexually charged nature of the vaudeville stage, looking at a broad array of provocative performers from disrobing dancers to nude posers to skimpily dressed athletes. Examining the ways in which big-time vaudeville nonetheless managed to market itself as pure, safe, and morally acceptable, this work compares the industry's marketing and promotional practices to those of other emergent mass-marketers of the vaudeville era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Included are in-depth examinations of important figures from the vaudeville stage such as Annette Kellerman and Eva Tanguay. The work attempts to address historical context as one means of understanding these performers with an appreciation for their rebelliousness. It discusses censorship and content control in the vaudeville era, and concludes with an analysis of film's part in the fall of vaudeville. Many photographs, cartoons, and other illustrations are included.

Download or read book Clicko written by Neil Parsons and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1920s and ’30s, Franz Taibosh—whose stage name was Clicko—performed in front of millions as one of the stars of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Prior to his fame in the United States, Taibosh toured the world as the “Wild Dancing Bushman,” showing off his frenzied dance moves in freak shows, sideshows, and music halls from Australia to Cuba. When he died in 1940, the New York Times called him “the only African bushman ever exhibited in this country.” In Clicko, Neil Parsons unearths the untold story of Taibosh’s journey from boyhood on a small farm in South Africa to top billing as one of the travelling World’s Fair Freaks. Through Taibosh’s tale, Parsons brings to life the bizarre golden age of entertainment as well as the role that the dubious new science of race played in it. Beginning with Taibosh’s early life, Clicko untangles the real story of his ancestry from the web of myths spun around him on his rise to international stardom. Parsons then chronicles the unhappy middle period of Taibosh’s career, when he suffered under the heel of a vicious manager. Left to freeze and nearly starve in an unheated apartment, Taibosh was rescued by Frank Cook, Barnum & Bailey’s lawyer. The Cooks adopted Taibosh as a member of their family of circus managers and performers, and his happy—if far from average—years with them make up the final chapter of this remarkable story. Equal parts entertaining and disturbing, Clicko vividly evokes a forgotten era when vaudeville drew massive crowds and circus freaks were featured in Billboard and Variety. Parsons introduces us to colorful characters such as George Auger the giant and the original Zip the Pinhead, but above all, he gives us an unforgettable portrait of Franz Taibosh, rescued at last from the racists and the romantics and revealed here as an ordinary man with an extraordinary life.