The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media: 20th Century Performances on Radio, Records, Film and Television

The minstrel show occupies a complex and controversial space in the history of American popular culture. Today considered a shameful relic of America's racist past, it nonetheless offered many black performers of the 19th and early 20th centuries their only opportunity to succeed in a white-dominated entertainment world, where white performers in blackface had by the 1830s established minstrelsy as an enduringly popular national art form.

This book traces the often overlooked history of the...