Gathered in this outstanding volume on America's first (but dubious) orgininal contribution to world theatre are rare primary materials - including firsthand accounts of minstrel shows, minstrelsy guides, jokes, sketches, and sheet music - and the best of contemporary scholarship. Included are chapters from Robert Toll's seminal Blacking Up and Eric Lott's more recent study of antebellum blackface performance, in which he argues that - contrary to the current consensus on minstrelsy as racist commodification of an already enslaved, noncitizen people - the audiences involved in early minstrelsy were not universally derisive of African Americans or their culture, and that there was a range of responses to the minstrel show which points to an instability or contradiction in the form itself - hence the title of his book, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Other articles were written especially for this collection. Essential for an understanding of American popular entertainment - theater, performance, and music.