Rowdy Carousals

The Bowery Boy on Stage, 1848-1913

J. Chris Westgate

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781609389475
• eBook ISBN: 9781609389482
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

Rowdy Carousals makes important interventions in nineteenth-century theatre history with regard to the Bowery Boy, a raucous, white, urban character most famously exemplified by Mose from A Glance at New York in 1848. Theatrical representations of the Bowery Boy emphasized the privileges of whiteness against nonwhite workers including enslaved and free African Americans during the Antebellum Period, an articulation of white superiority that continued through the early twentieth century with Jewish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants.

The book's examination of working-class whiteness on stage, in the theatre, and in print culture invites theatre historians and critics to check the impulse to downplay or ignore questions about race and ethnicity in discussion of the Bowery Boy. J. Chris Westgate further explores links between the Bowery Boy's rowdyism in the nineteenth century and the resurgence of white supremacy in the early twenty-first century.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. “The B’hoys of Those Dreadful Days”
• Chapter 1. “A True Specimen of the B’hoys”: Mose the Fireman Takes the Stage
• Chapter 2. “The Mose Season” and Beyond: A Quarter Century of Mose Sketches
• Chapter 3. “A Scurvy Pantheon”: The Boys of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Elsewhere
• Chapter 4. “The Great-Hearted Bowery-Boy Type”: Comedy, Farce, and Musicals from the Postbellum to the Progressive Era
• Chapter 5. A Thriller “with a Big T”: Melodrama, Crime, and Adventure with the Bowery Boy in the Progressive Era
• Chapter 6. “The Original Chimmie Fadden”: Chuck Connors and the Last of the Bowery Boys
• Epilogue. “The Rowdy of Then and Now”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List