Culture and Containment

Race, Geographic Mobility, and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century America

Colin Anderson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781469698120
  9781469698113
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469692296
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Movement—who moves, where they move, and how they move—has long been perceived as a racial threat in the United States. To better understand why, Colin Anderson examines how popular culture played a central role in shaping these perceptions during the transformative period of Greater Reconstruction (1845–1900). From sheet music and lithographs to plantation reenactments and Wild West shows, white cultural producers depicted Black and Native mobility as destabilizing. These depictions normalized fears of movement and justified the rise of systems designed to confine these communities, such as Jim Crow segregation and Native American reservations. Using a trans-regional framework spanning the North, South, and West, Anderson places these histories side by side, revealing the shared logic of racial spatial control and reframing nineteenth-century US history as a story of nation-building intertwined with segregation and capitalism.

Yet popular culture was a contested space. Black and Native performers, writers, and activists used the same platforms as white creators to assert agency, resist confinement, and challenge dominant narratives of mobility. By illuminating these dynamics, Culture and Containment reshapes our understanding of nineteenth-century race relations while offering vital insight into enduring legacies—from residential segregation to mass incarceration—that continues to define the racial landscape through the twenty-first century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Historical Groundings: Constructions of Racial Movement in Antebellum Popular Song
• Chapter Two. Differing Natures: Representations of Gender, Racial Mobility, and Nature in Antebellum Sheet Music
• Chapter Three. Reconstructions: Westward Expansion, Emancipation, and Images of Racial Mobility in Popular Culture, 1850–1885
• Chapter Four. Consolidation and Contestation: Popular Culture, Segregation, and Black Resistance, 1880–1900
• Chapter Five. Imagining Segregation: Popular Culture and Black Urban Space Before the Ghetto, 1877–1900
• Chapter Six. Arenas of Mobility: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the Black America Plantation Reenactment, 1880–1900
• Epilogue. Lock My Body, Can’t Trap My Mind
• Notes
• Index