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I QLRC~~RC~. QRRnUm, AnD n~WSPRP~R QRLLYHOO IN 1832, THOMAS DARTMOUTH RICE, A YOUNG FORMER carpenter's apprentice wearing blackface, electrified his boisterous workingclass audience by spinning around on a Bowery stage with a curious, jerky motion and singing: "Weel about and turn about, I And do jis so; I Eb'ry time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow." A year later, the newspaper publisher Benjamin Day, age twenty-three, launched a newspaper that was about one-third the size of other papers, sold at the incredibly cheap price of one cent, and highlighted sensational murders, tragedies, and gossip. And, in mid-1835, Phineas Taylor Barnum, a twenty-five-year-old refugee from the dry goods business, exhibited a decrepit, partially paralyzed, blind slave woman who supposedly was 161 years old and had nursed and cared for "dear little George" Washington, the nation's first president.1 Here, in the early 1830s, within a few brief years and within a few blocks in New York City, the scaffolding for modern popular culture in the United States took shape. The pillars of this rapidly emerging world of cheap, accessible, and rambunctious entertainments included blackface minstrelsy, which "Daddy" Rice's "Jim Crow" performance elevated to new levels of popularity; the penny press, which heralded a revolution in America's print industry; and "the show business," as Barnum dubbed it and which he, as much as anyone, helped define and fit with the era's democratic sensibilities. Each benefited from ongoing changes in communications and transportation. Each initially catered to enthusiastic working-class audiences, much to the chagrin of nervous social elites and an upstart middle class whose members worried that raucous amusements threatened civility and good character. Each in one way or another ultimately helped blur boundaries separating races, genders, and classes. Each attested to the force of the rising democratic politics that Andrew Jackson symbolized as 12 WITH AMUSEMENT FOR ALL well as the upheaval of the emerging market economy. And each helped put in motion trends and patterns that continued to play out generations later.2 In the late 1820s, even before T. D. Rice took his little song and dance to what he described as "unsophisticated" Bowery audiences, a friend of the fledgling songwriter Stephen Foster observed that "Jim Crow was on everybody's tongue." Its popularity had spread after Rice first introduced his Jim Crow steps and little tune in Louisville, when he was acting in a play, The Rifle. He reportedly did so after observing a slave, who was cleaning a stable, do the odd, jerky movements, hunching his shoulders , shuffling, spinning around on his heel, and singing. In fact, however, according to one minstrel scholar: "No single stable hand made up or taught the song. Instead there was a widespread African-American folk dance impersonating-delineating--crows, based in agricultural ritual and, some say, 'magical in character."' Whether or not Rice realized that he was adapting a regional folklore character, he soon added, between acts of The Rifle, other "Negro" performances. Singing "Me and My Shadow," for example , he danced while a child actor in blackface mimicked his steps. By the time Rice took his talents to New York City, he enjoyed a popular stage reputation as "the negro, par excellence."3 Although "jumping Jim Crow" elevated Rice from obscurity and made him one of the best-known actors of his era, blackface performances were far from new. Indeed, they were deeply rooted in the carnivals and festivals of early modern Europe. A carnival served as "an anti-holiday (literally an unholy feast)," and the line between celebration and criminality or violence was thin. Rowdy celebrants, often hiding their identities behind costumes and masks, defied propriety and traditional roles and assumed the identities of other people. Centuries later, during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, participants continued to carry that tradition into the streets, momentarily celebrating disorder and reversing roles. Similarly, in Finland, citizens staged an annual revelry-Vappu-by donning masks, parading through the streets with drinks in their hands, ringing doorbells, and urinating in public. During these "inversion rituals," as scholars would later describe them, boisterous, sometimes riotous participants momentarily turned the existing social order upside down, switching roles, repudiating decorum, and threatening traditional authority figures.4 Sometimes during such carnivals, a commoner would become "King for a Day," or a "Lord of Misrule," briefly playing out a charade in which the subjects took charge while the obliging ruling classes allowed their...

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