By LeRoy Ashby; University Press of Kentucky, 648 pages, $39.95

May 28, 2006

In 1831, Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a young former carpenter's apprentice wearing blackface, electrified his boisterous working-class audience by spinning around on a Bowery stage with a curious, jerky motion and singing: “Weel about and turn about, / And do jis so; / 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.

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 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.

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