100 books like Inside the Minstrel Mask

By Annemarie Bean (editor), James V. Hatch (editor), Brooks McNamara (editor)

Here are 100 books that Inside the Minstrel Mask fans have personally recommended if you like Inside the Minstrel Mask. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Censoring Racial Ridicule: Irish, Jewish, and African American Struggles over Race and Representation, 1890-1930

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

From my list on understanding the minstrel show.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a former network television executive who is fascinated by the history of mass media and have authored or co-authored nine books and many articles on the subject. These include The Complete Directory to Primetime Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present and Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919. I’m particularly drawn to subjects that are underexplored, or which seem to be greatly misunderstood today. I quickly learned that you are not likely to earn a living from writing, so I decided to write about subjects I cared about, and hopefully add something to our knowledge of cultural history. I became more aware of what the professional minstrel show was really like while researching Lost Sounds, based on original accounts, recordings, and films.

Tim's book list on understanding the minstrel show

Tim Brooks Why did Tim love this book?

A unique and insightful look at how three groups fought back against their widespread stereotyping in the media of the early 20th century, and how two of them largely succeeded in changing these portrayals. The reasons why African-Americans were much less successful than Irish and Jews in fighting stereotypes are complex and fascinating, and hold lessons for us today.

By M. Alison Kibler,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Censoring Racial Ridicule as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A drunken Irish maid slips and falls. A greedy Jewish pawnbroker lures his female employee into prostitution. An African American man leers at a white woman. These and other, similar images appeared widely on stages and screens across America during the early twentieth century. In this provocative study, M. Alison Kibler uncovers, for the first time, powerful and concurrent campaigns by Irish, Jewish and African Americans against racial ridicule in popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Censoring Racial Ridicule explores how Irish, Jewish, and African American groups of the era resisted harmful representations in popular culture by…


Book cover of Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America

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

From my list on understanding the minstrel show.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a former network television executive who is fascinated by the history of mass media and have authored or co-authored nine books and many articles on the subject. These include The Complete Directory to Primetime Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present and Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919. I’m particularly drawn to subjects that are underexplored, or which seem to be greatly misunderstood today. I quickly learned that you are not likely to earn a living from writing, so I decided to write about subjects I cared about, and hopefully add something to our knowledge of cultural history. I became more aware of what the professional minstrel show was really like while researching Lost Sounds, based on original accounts, recordings, and films.

Tim's book list on understanding the minstrel show

Tim Brooks Why did Tim love this book?

Published almost half a century ago (1974), but still the best introduction to the minstrel show as it emerged in America in the 1840s. Describes the various elements of a minstrel show, how it was originally received, and how it materially evolved in the late 1800s, but stops at the end of the century. A good, readable overview of this highly popular form of entertainment as it was originally performed on stage.

By Robert C. Toll,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Blacking Up as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Book cover of Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain

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

From my list on understanding the minstrel show.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a former network television executive who is fascinated by the history of mass media and have authored or co-authored nine books and many articles on the subject. These include The Complete Directory to Primetime Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present and Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919. I’m particularly drawn to subjects that are underexplored, or which seem to be greatly misunderstood today. I quickly learned that you are not likely to earn a living from writing, so I decided to write about subjects I cared about, and hopefully add something to our knowledge of cultural history. I became more aware of what the professional minstrel show was really like while researching Lost Sounds, based on original accounts, recordings, and films.

Tim's book list on understanding the minstrel show

Tim Brooks Why did Tim love this book?

Americans and Brits alike will be amazed to learn how pervasive the minstrel show was in Britain in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally experienced as an import, Britain developed its own minstrel troupes and stars and continued to embrace the format long after it was deemed unacceptable in the U.S.A. BBC television’s highly popular Black and White Minstrel Show lasted—are you ready for this?—until 1978. The troupe even performed for the royal family at the annual Royal Variety Charity Performances, although modern editors have tried to scrub that fact from the historical record.

By Michael Pickering,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Blackface minstrelsy is associated particularly with popular culture in the United States and Britain, yet despite the continual two-way flow of performers, troupes and companies across the Atlantic, there is little in Britain to match the scholarship of blackface studies in the States. This book concentrates on the distinctively British trajectory of minstrelsy. The historical study and cultural analysis of minstrelsy is important because of the significant role it played in Britain as a form of song, music and theatrical entertainment. Minstrelsy had a marked impact on popular music, dance and other aspects of popular culture, both in Britain and…


Book cover of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

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

From my list on understanding the minstrel show.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a former network television executive who is fascinated by the history of mass media and have authored or co-authored nine books and many articles on the subject. These include The Complete Directory to Primetime Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present and Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919. I’m particularly drawn to subjects that are underexplored, or which seem to be greatly misunderstood today. I quickly learned that you are not likely to earn a living from writing, so I decided to write about subjects I cared about, and hopefully add something to our knowledge of cultural history. I became more aware of what the professional minstrel show was really like while researching Lost Sounds, based on original accounts, recordings, and films.

Tim's book list on understanding the minstrel show

Tim Brooks Why did Tim love this book?

A highly opinionated, and thus sometimes frustrating, analysis of the pre-Civil War minstrel show, and how it impacted both oppressed African-Americans and the working-class whites who made the shows so popular. This was the first major book to advance the idea that the minstrel show was not only an exploitation of black culture (the “theft”), but also appreciated that culture and began its integration into the American musical mainstream (the “love”), which would prove to have profound implications in decades to come. An influential book that has been frequently cited in subsequent works.

By Eric Lott,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Love and Theft as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes usefully intensified them. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically contributing to a
"blackening of America." Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of the years leading…


Book cover of With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire

Stephen Tuffnell Author Of Made in Britain: Nation and Emigration in Nineteenth-Century America

From my list on the USA and the world in the nineteenth century.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian of the United States' global pasts. What excites me most in both research and teaching is approaching familiar topics from unconventional angles whether through unfamiliar objects or comparative perspectives. To do so I have approached the US past from the perspective of its emigrants and the global history of gold rushes, and am doing so now in two projects: one on the ice trade and another on the United States’ imperial relationship with Africa between the Diamond Rush of 1867 and the First World War. I currently teach at the University of Oxford where I am a Fellow in History at St Peter’s College.

Stephen's book list on the USA and the world in the nineteenth century

Stephen Tuffnell Why did Stephen love this book?

It’s not possible to understand the United States without understanding its maritime past. Rouleau takes us onto the forecastle to show just how important US mariners were (how could they not be when 100,00 departed the republic each year?) in a vivid account with lots of surprising details drawn from scrimshaw and logbooks. These working-class diplomats shaped the foreign perception of the United States in port cities around the world through their (often violent) encounters with foreign peoples, their onshore carousing, and their spread of black face minstrelsy around the globe.

By Brian Rouleau,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked With Sails Whitening Every Sea as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Many Americans in the Early Republic era saw the seas as another field for national aggrandizement. With a merchant marine that competed against Britain for commercial supremacy and a whaling fleet that circled the globe, the United States sought a maritime empire to complement its territorial ambitions in North America. In With Sails Whitening Every Sea, Brian Rouleau argues that because of their ubiquity in foreign ports, American sailors were the principal agents of overseas foreign relations in the early republic. Their everyday encounters and more problematic interactions-barroom brawling, sexual escapades in port-city bordellos, and the performance of blackface minstrel…


Book cover of Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry

Hollis Robbins Author Of Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition

From my list on Black poetry.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been writing and teaching about African American poetry and poetics for more than two decades. My passion began when I kept discovering long-lost poems that were published once, in Black newspapers, and then forgotten. I wondered why I had never learned about Gwendolyn Brooks in school, though I’d read about e.e. cummings and Robert Frost. Once I stumbled on the fact that Claude McKay discovered cummings, I realized how much the questions of influence and power aren’t really central topics in thinking about the genealogy of Black poets and their influence on each other and on poetry in general.

Hollis' book list on Black poetry

Hollis Robbins Why did Hollis love this book?

Nadia Nurhussein’s book is critically important for understanding the role of dialect poetry in the African American poetic tradition. It is all too easy to dismiss the popularity of dialect poetry in America—including Black dialect—as an embarrassing phase in American taste and particularly problematic for poetry used in minstrelsy but Nurhussein argues for the importance of the craft of dialect poetry and the remarkable brilliance of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s work along with many other poets working in many other dialects.

By Nadia Nurhussein,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Rhetorics of Literacy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?


Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry explores the production and reception of dialect poetry in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America and investigates the genre’s rhetorical interest in where sound meets print. Dialect poetry’s popularity stems not only from its use as an entertaining distraction from “serious” poetry, but as a surprisingly complicated pedagogical tool collaborating with elite literary culture. Indeed, the intersections of the oral and textual aspects of the dialect poem, visible in both its composition and its reception, resulted in confusing and contradictory interactions with the genre.

 

In this innovative study, Nadia Nurhussein demonstrates…


Book cover of Redwood and Wildfire

Caroline Stevermer Author Of The Glass Magician

From my list on historical fantasy for armchair travel.

Why am I passionate about this?

I write fantasy novels, including A College of Magics, River Rats, and When the King Comes Home. With Patricia C. Wrede, I wrote half of the Kate and Cecy series: Sorcery and Cecelia, The Grand Tour, and The Mislaid Magician.

Caroline's book list on historical fantasy for armchair travel

Caroline Stevermer Why did Caroline love this book?

As brilliantly written as it is sometimes difficult to read, this fantasy novel set in the early 20th century travels from rural Georgia to Chicago, part of the Great Migration. Hairston says "I wrote Redwood and Wildfire to celebrate folks like my great-aunt and grandfather who faced impossible choices." In so doing, she has told stories history has all but forgotten. I began to read this book because I knew it contained a passage involving a visit to the 1893 Columbian Exposition—The White City—but my favorite parts of this novel involve the show folk and the Black film industry in Chicago. Hairston's characters don't just do magic. They are magic.

By Andrea Hairston,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Redwood and Wildfire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

At the turn of the 20th century, minstrel shows transform into vaudeville, which slides into moving pictures. Hunkering together in dark theatres, diverse audiences marvel at flickering images. This 'dreaming in public' becomes common culture and part of what transforms immigrants and 'native' born into Americans.

Redwood, an African American woman, and Aidan, a Seminole Irish man, journey from Georgia to Chicago, from haunted swampland to a 'city of the future.' They are gifted performers and hoodoo conjurors, struggling to call up the wondrous world they imagine, not just on stage and screen, but on city streets, in front parlors,…


Book cover of Country: The Twisted Roots Of Rock 'n' Roll

Hal Taylor Author Of For a Song: The Most Enduring Tunes Ever Written

From my list on music’s most famous back stories.

Why am I passionate about this?

Writing about history came to me rather late in life and I suppose it’s because the past now looks more inviting than the future. But there’s more to it than that. Everything has a history; it’s a bottomless topic. I became fascinated with the history of my own geographic environment and began exploring areas that were basically in my own backyard, which led to the inception of my first book. And, after years working as a graphic artist, I decided to help the narrative along by adding illustrations. A second book soon followed, then a third, a fourth, and now I’ve just finished my fifth book.

Hal's book list on music’s most famous back stories

Hal Taylor Why did Hal love this book?

No one can say exactly when Rock ’n’ Roll was born, including biographer, novelist, poet, and recently deceased journalist Nick Tosches, but he provides enough background musings to take us on a wild ride through American musical history.

His book reveals twisted roots indeed, some that provided me with reference material regarding a connection between minstrelsy and one of the most popular Christmas tunes of all time. And a country song breaks loose from the genre corral and into the world of pop music when it is made into one of the best-known ballads ever by a singing politician.

By Nick Tosches,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Country as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Celebrating the dark origins of our most American music, Country reveals a wild shadowland of history that encompasses blackface minstrels and yodeling cowboys honky-tonk hell and rockabilly heaven medieval myth and musical miscegenation sex, drugs, murder and rays of fierce illumination on Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others, famous and forgotten, whose demonology is America's own. Profusely and superbly illustrated, Country stands as one of the most brilliant explorations of American musical culture ever written.


Book cover of Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now

Andrea Freeman Author Of Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch

From my list on food that won’t make you hungry.

Why am I passionate about this?

I love to eat and want to understand why we make the food choices we do—when we are lucky enough to have choices. I have an insatiable appetite for books that examine the underbelly of food traditions and policies. I have been studying the relationship between food and racism for over fifteen years, and I am still not even close to full.

Andrea's book list on food that won’t make you hungry

Andrea Freeman Why did Andrea love this book?

A restaurant where customers walked through a caricatured Black man’s mouth to enter? A fine dining establishment that advertised itself as a Slave Market? An eatery housed in a giant mammy that sells mammy-shaped lamps? This sounds like a racist dystopia, but it’s not–it is the reality documented in Naa Oyo A. Kwate’s book about racist restaurants, past and present. You may feel queasy about going out to eat after ingesting these sordid tales. 

By Naa Oyo A. Kwate,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Burgers in Blackface as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Exposes and explores the prevalence of racist restaurant branding in the United States

Aunt Jemima is the face of pancake mix. Uncle Ben sells rice. Chef Rastus shills for Cream of Wheat. Stereotyped Black faces and bodies have long promoted retail food products that are household names. Much less visible to the public are the numerous restaurants that deploy unapologetically racist logos, themes, and architecture. These marketing concepts, which center nostalgia for a racist past and commemoration of our racist present, reveal the deeply entrenched American investment in anti-blackness. Drawing on wide-ranging sources from the late 1800s to the present,…


Book cover of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights

Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant Author Of Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in Civil War America

From my list on childhood in Civil War Era America.

Why are we passionate about this?

We are two historians who have been writing together for about a decade now, first on project related to race relations after WWI, then on a book about debates over the enlistment age in nineteenth century America. Rebecca teaches at UCSD while Frances works at the University of Sydney in Australia, but we regularly meet online to write together and talk about our favorite new books.

Frances' book list on childhood in Civil War Era America

Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant Why did Frances love this book?

Who gets to claim “childhood innocence” and the protections that come with this designation? Certainly not Black children in nineteenth-century America, according to Robin Bernstein. They were instead pictured as “pickaninnies”—comic figures who felt no pain, whatever mischief befell them. This book won a slew of awards for good reason: reading the racial ‘scripts’ in seemingly innocuous cultural products like children’s picture books, dolls, and knickknacks, Bernstein reveals how race-making hides in plain sight.

By Robin Bernstein,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Racial Innocence as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

2013 Book Award Winner from the International Research Society in Children's Literature
2012 Outstanding Book Award Winner from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education
2012 Winner of the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize presented by the New England American Studies Association
2012 Runner-Up, John Hope Franklin Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association
2012 Honorable Mention, Distinguished Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers

Dissects how "innocence" became the exclusive province of white children, covering slavery to the Civil Rights era
Beginning in the mid nineteenth century in America, childhood became synonymous…


Book cover of Censoring Racial Ridicule: Irish, Jewish, and African American Struggles over Race and Representation, 1890-1930
Book cover of Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America
Book cover of Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain

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