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The James Adams Floating Theatre
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Book Synopsis The James Adams Floating Theatre by : C. Richard Gillespie
Download or read book The James Adams Floating Theatre written by C. Richard Gillespie and published by Cornell Maritime Press/Tidewater Publishers. This book was released on 1991 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The boat on which Edna Ferber based her famous novel brought excitement and entertainment to isolated small towns up and down the East Coast in early twentieth-century America. The builder of the boat, James E. Adams, was a farmer from Michigan who taught himself to be a circus aerialist, started and prospered with his own carnival company, and, when retirement proved boring, decided to build a showboat. The book traces the history of the James Adams from its inception until its demise twenty-seven years later, a tale that includes fires, sinkings, a shooting, arrests, and several deaths.
Book Synopsis Musical Maryland by : David K. Hildebrand
Download or read book Musical Maryland written by David K. Hildebrand and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only book to delve deeply into Maryland’s rich musical performance history and the people who created it. In Musical Maryland, the first comprehensive survey of the music emanating from the Old Line State, David K. Hildebrand and Elizabeth M. Schaaf explore the myriad ways in which music has enriched the lives of Marylanders. From the drinking songs of colonial Annapolis, the liturgical music of the Zion Lutheran Church, and the work songs of the tobacco fields to the exuberant marches of late nineteenth-century Baltimore Orioles festivals, Chick Webb’s mastery on drums, and the triumphs of the Baltimore Opera Society, this richly illustrated volume explores more than 300 years of Maryland’s music history. Beginning with early compositions performed in private settings and in public concerts, this book touches on the development of music clubs like the Tuesday Club, the Florestan Society, and H. L. Mencken’s Saturday Night Club, as well as lasting institutions such as the Peabody Institute and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO). Yet the soundscape also includes militia quicksteps, sea chanteys, and other work songs. The book describes the writing of “The Star-Spangled Banner"—perhaps Maryland's single greatest contribution to the nation's musical history. It chronicles the wide range of music created and performed by Maryland’s African American musicians along Pennsylvania Avenue in racially segregated Baltimore, from jazz to symphonic works. It also tells the true story of a deliberately integrated concert that the BSO staged at the end of World War II. The book is full of musical examples, engravings, paintings, drawings, and historic photographs that not only portray the composers and performers but also the places around the state in which music flourished. Illuminating sidebars by William Biehl focus on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century song of the kind evoked by the USS Baltimore or inspired by the state's history, natural beauty, and romantic steamboats. The book also offers a sampling of the tunes that Maryland’s more remarkable composers and performers, including Billie Holiday, Eubie Blake, and Cab Calloway, contributed to American music before the homogenization that arrived in earnest after World War II. Bringing to life not only portraits of musicians, composers, and conductors whose stories and recollections are woven into the fabric of this book, but also musical scores and concert halls, Musical Maryland is an engaging, authoritative, and bold look at an endlessly compelling subject.
Book Synopsis Legendary Locals of Elizabeth City by : Marjorie Ann Berry
Download or read book Legendary Locals of Elizabeth City written by Marjorie Ann Berry and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2014 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth City is rich in legend and lore. The pirate Blackbeard was a frequent visitor to the area, selling his ill-gotten goods to a willing populace. The Wright brothers made Elizabeth City the first leg of their trips to Kitty Hawk, and they bought materials to build their flying machine from Kramer Brothers, a local lumberyard. Champion nine-ball player Luther "Wimpy" Lassiter was born and died here. Young "Beautiful Nell" Cropsey was murdered in 1901; her death is the town's most enduring mystery. Newspaperman W.O. Saunders, editor of the Independent, was known nationally after he walked down New York's Fifth Avenue in pajamas to protest uncomfortable work attire. Young Tamsen Donner, a member of the ill-fated Donner Party, was a teacher here in the 1830s. Fred Fearing's Rose Buddies welcomed boaters to Elizabeth City with homegrown roses and wine and cheese parties. He has entertained Walter Cronkite and Willard Scott, among other luminaries. These are just a few of the stories, mysteries, and legends of Elizabeth City's past and present.
Download or read book Coming Soon!!! written by John Barth and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2001 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this novelistic romp that is by turns hilarious and brilliant, John Barth spoofs his own place in the pantheon of contemporary fiction and the generation of writers who have followed his literary trailblazing. Coming Soon!!! is the tale of two writers: an older, retiring novelist setting out to write his last work and a young, aspiring writer of hypertext intent on toppling his master. In the heat of their rivalry, the writers navigate, and sometimes stumble over, the cultural fault lines between print and electronic fiction, mentor and mentee, postmodernism and modernism.
Download or read book Theaters written by Andrew Craig Morrison and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest title in the Norton/Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks series, Theaters offers a richly illustrated history of a revered cultural artifact and a technological challenge, following its progression from the eighteenth-century opera house to the modern movie multiplex. This visual sourcebook traces the development of its colorful and varied forms as they developed in early America, on the western frontier, and in cities from coast to coast. The first comprehensive study of American theaters, it illustrates their wide range from raucous music halls to vaudeville, from circus to grand opera, from World's Fair to Coney island, from nickelodeon to glorious picture palace. Also featured are theaters for burlesque, theaters afloat, military theaters, Shakespearean theaters, summer theaters, theaters and African-Americans, and arenas (when a stage just won't do), enlivened by a cast of entrepreneurs and showmen who were the movers and shakers of our theatrical heritage. CD-ROM included: screen resolution scans in easy-to-use TIFF format for Mac and PC.
Download or read book Showboats written by Philip Graham and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a delightful and authoritative record of America's showboats from the first one, launched in 1831, to the last, ultimately tied up at a St. Louis dock. It is also a record of the men and women who built and loved these floating theaters, of those who performed on their stages, and of the thousands who sat in their auditoriums. And, lastly, it is a record of a genuine folk institution, as American as catfish, which for more than a century did much to relieve the social and cultural starvation of our vast river frontier. For these showboats brought their rich cargoes of entertainment—genuine laughter, a glimpse of other worlds, a respite from the grinding hardship of the present, emotional relaxation—to valley farmers, isolated factory workers and miners, and backwoodsmen who otherwise would have lacked all such opportunities. To the more privileged , the showboats brought pleasant reminder of a half-forgotten culture. They penetrated regions where churches and school had not gone, and where land theaters were for generations to be impossible. Like circuit preachers, they carried their message to the outer fringes of American civilization. In spite of many faults, it was a good message. The frontier had created this institution to fill a genuine need, and it lasted only until other and better means of civilizing these regions could reach them—good roads, automobiles, motion pictures, schools, churches, newspapers, and theaters. But although the showboats have passed into history, they have left a rich legacy. As long as the Mississippi flows into the Gulf, their story will fire the imagination of Americans. Showboating has become so legendary that few Americans know what this unique institution was really like. In Showboats, at long last, the true story emerges. It differs in many important respects from the motion picture and fictional versions to which Americans are accustomed, but it is not a whit the less glamorous. Philip Graham has told his story with imagination, genuine insight, and complete devotion to facts. No one who is interested in America's past should fail to read it.
Download or read book The Life of "P" written by Lee Rice and published by Brandylane Publishers Inc. This book was released on 2007 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Billboard written by and published by . This book was released on 1926 with total page 1016 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Here Comes The Showboat! by : Betty Bryant
Download or read book Here Comes The Showboat! written by Betty Bryant and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I was born at the tail end of a unique and delightful era and raised on one of the last showboats to struggle for survival against the devastating crunch of progress.... Our showboat's express purpose was carrying entertainment to hundreds of thousands of river-bottom farmers along our water-bordered frontier." —from the book Betty Bryant was a river rat. The Floating Theater was her home, and the river was her back yard. While other children were learning to walk, she was learning to swim. She knew how to set a trotline, gig a frog, catch a crawdad, and strip the mud vein out of a carp by the time she was four. In this colorful memoir, Betty shares her own piece of Americana, the small, family-owned showboat of the early twentieth century. Billy Bryant's Showboat plied the inland waterways of the Ohio River watershed from before the First World War until 1942, bringing a blend of melodrama and vaudeville, laughter and therapeutic tears, into the lives of isolated people in rural communities along the way. Betty made her first professional appearance at the age of six weeks when she played a baby in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." In her twenty years of touring, she acted, danced, and grew up in the tradition of "family entertainment, by families, for families." Here Comes the Showboat! is told with the ageless wonder of a child who loved the showboat and the eager audiences its uniquely American entertainment touched. It is a treasure trove of humorous anecdotes, touching remembrances, and delightful photographs of Betty, the three generations who ran the family showboat, miners, musselers, shantyboaters, farmers, merchants, and actors whose lives intersected along the Ohio River.
Download or read book Show Boat written by Edna Ferber and published by Bibliotech Press. This book was released on 2023-01-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Show Boat is a 1926 novel by American author and dramatist Edna Ferber. It chronicles the lives of three generations of performers on the Cotton Blossom, a floating theater on a steamboat that travels between small towns along the banks of the Mississippi River, from the 1880s to the 1920s. The story moves from the Reconstruction Era riverboat to Gilded Age Chicago to Roaring Twenties New York, and finally returns to the Mississippi River. Show Boat was adapted as a Broadway musical in 1927 by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. Three films followed: a 1929 version that depended partly on the musical, and two full adaptations of the musical in 1936 and 1951. In August 1924, Edna Ferber watched as the opening performance of her play Minick (co-written with George S. Kaufman) was disrupted by an invasion of bats that had been nesting undetected in the chandeliers and dome of the playhouse. Alarmed theatergoers scurried for the exits. As the crew recovered from this debacle, Winthrop Ames, the show's producer, jokingly remarked: "Next time... we won't bother with tryouts. We'll all charter a show boat and we'll just drift down the rivers, playing the towns as we come to them." Show boats were floating theaters that traveled along rivers of the United States from the 1870s to the 1930s. The performers lived aboard the vessels. With song, dance, and dramatic productions, show boats provided entertainment for small riverside towns that were otherwise quite isolated. Ferber, who had never heard of show boats, was immediately intrigued: "Here, I thought, was one of the most melodramatic and gorgeous bits of Americana that had ever come my way. It was not only the theater - it was the theater plus the glamour of the wandering drifting life, the drama of the river towns, the mystery and terror of the Mississippi itself... I spent a year hunting down every available scrap of show-boat material; reading, interviewing, taking notes and making outlines." In 1925, Ferber traveled to Bath, North Carolina, and spent four days aboard one of the few remaining show boats in the country, the James Adams Floating Theatre, which plied the Pamlico River and Great Dismal Swamp Canal. An account of Ferber's visit to Bath is posted at NCHistoricSites.org. The material she gathered, especially the reminiscences of Charles Hunter, the director and chief actor, provided her with "a treasure-trove of show-boat material, human, touching, true." Ferber spent the next year in France and New York writing the novel, and published it in the summer of 1926. The mix of romance, realistic depiction of racial issues, and nostalgia for a vanishing American past was an immediate hit with the public, and the novel was number one on the bestseller lists for twelve weeks. The critical reception was more cautious but still positive. In his New York Times review, Louis Kronenberger wrote: "With Show Boat, Miss Ferber establishes herself not as one of those who are inaugurating first-rate literature, but as one of those who are reviving first-rate story-telling. This is little else but an irresistible story; but that, surely, is enough." By the time the James Adams Floating Theatre was destroyed by fire in 1941, the era of show boats had ended, supplanted by the motion pictures theater. Writing for the Jewish Women's Archive, Allison Abrams described Show Boat as "problematic" on race, claiming that the novel "maintains a romanticized and subordinate image of Black Americans", uses "dehumanizing and animalistic terms" for Black people, perpetuates racial stereotypes about Black men, and "lumps Black Americans in the fold of the working class which is reflective of a perception of race as an economic class...and less so a social reality." (wikipedia.org)
Book Synopsis Little Rivers and Waterway Tales by : Bland Simpson
Download or read book Little Rivers and Waterway Tales written by Bland Simpson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-07-29 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bland Simpson regales us with new tales of coastal North Carolina's "water-loving land," revealing how its creeks, streams, and rivers shape the region's geography as well as its culture. Drawing on deep family ties and coastal travels, Simpson and wife and collaborator Ann Cary Simpson tell the stories of those who have lived and worked in this country, chronicling both a distinct environment and a way of life. Whether rhapsodizing about learning to sail on the Pasquotank River or eating oysters on Ocracoke, he introduces readers to the people and communities along the watery web of myriad "little rivers" that define North Carolina's sound country as it meets the Atlantic. With nearly sixty of Ann Simpson's photographs, Little Rivers joins the Simpsons' two previous works, Into the Sound Country and The Inner Islands, in offering a rich narrative and visual document of eastern North Carolina's particular beauty. Urging readers to take note of the poetry in "every rivulet and rill, every creek, crick, branch, run, stream, prong, fork, river, pocosin, swamp, basin, estuary, cove, bay, and sound," the Simpsons show how the coastal plain's river systems are in many ways the region's heart and soul.
Book Synopsis Smithfield by : Patrick Evans-Hylton
Download or read book Smithfield written by Patrick Evans-Hylton and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Isle of Wight County and Smithfield are nearly as old as the settlement of the nation itself. In 1608, explorer Capt. John Smith visited the area south of his Jamestown Colony in search of food and trade with the Warascoyak Indians. The region's first inhabitants took root in 1619, and the town of Smithfield was established in 1752. A culinary specialty of the area learned from the Native Americans was introduced to the rest of the world in the late 1700s--a salt-cured cut of pork later known as Smithfield Ham. The popularity of the ham grew, and everyone from royalty (Queen Victoria ordered hams frequently) to presidents have dined on the delicacy, making the quaint village of 6,500 "Ham Town U.S.A." Today, the only place to get a genuine Smithfield ham is from this Virginia town.
Book Synopsis America's Wetland by : Roy T. Sawyer
Download or read book America's Wetland written by Roy T. Sawyer and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2010-05-05 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The geologically ancient Tidewater region of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina rests precariously atop millions of years of erosion from the nearby Appalachian Mountains. An immense wetland at near sea level, it is host to every conceivable body of fresh water, ranging from brooding swamps and large hidden lakes to sluggish blackwater rivers and brackish sounds (one of which was so large an early explorer thought he had found the Pacific Ocean). In this engaging book, biologist and Tidewater native Roy T. Sawyer delivers an ecohistory of this unique waterland whose wind-driven tides cover a rich human and natural past. Jutting prominently into the Atlantic, this wetland is the final stop for the warmth of the Gulf Stream before it is deflected from the American mainland. At the top of a narrow, warm coastal strip, it provides an ideal home for a vast array of animal and plant life, including prodigious numbers of reptiles (such as the world’s northernmost population of alligators) and overwintering waterfowl. It is also home to the oldest known living trees east of the Rocky Mountains. The climate and geography made the area a natural choice for very early human habitation--as far back as the last ice age, when the region was a rich oasis just south of a veritable tundra. In examining the impact of humans upon this environment, and vice-versa, Sawyer reveals how our alarming shortsightedness has produced a fragile and endangered present. Although human manipulation started here as early as ten thousand years ago (coinciding with extinction of mammoths and other megafauna), the environment has been altered most radically over only the last one hundred years, particularly in regard to land drainage, deforestation, overfishing, and pollution. The author provides an authoritative overview of the human impact on these wetlands and suggests ways in which we might still salvage them. In so doing, he explores the effects of hurricanes, droughts, forest fires, and ice ages of the past--and anticipates, in this age of global warming, natural events that may be still to come.
Download or read book Final Fridays written by John Barth and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, acclaimed author John Barth has strayed from his Monday–through–Thursday–morning routine of fiction–writing and dedicated Friday mornings to the muse of nonfiction. The result is Final Fridays, his third essay collection, following The Friday Book (1984) and Further Fridays (1995). Sixteen years and six novels since his last volume of non–fiction, Barth delivers yet another remarkable work comprised of 27 insightful essays. With pieces covering everything from reading, writing, and the state of the art, to tributes to writer–friends and family members, this collection is witty and engaging throughout. Barth's "unaffected love of learning" (San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle) and "joy in thinking that becomes contagious" (Washington Post), shine through in this third, and, with an implied question mark, final essay collection.
Download or read book Staging Ground written by Leslie Stainton and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2014-06-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this poignant and personal history of one of America’s oldest theaters, Leslie Stainton captures the story not just of an extraordinary building but of a nation’s tumultuous struggle to invent itself. Built in 1852 and in use ever since, the Fulton Theatre in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is uniquely ghosted. Its foundations were once the walls of a colonial jail that in 1763 witnessed the massacre of the last surviving Conestoga Indians. Those same walls later served to incarcerate fugitive slaves. Staging Ground explores these tragic events and their enduring resonance in a building that later became a town hall, theater, and movie house—the site of minstrel shows, productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, oratory by the likes of Thaddeus Stevens and Mark Twain, performances by Buffalo Bill and his troupe of “Wild Indians,” Hollywood Westerns, and twenty-first-century musicals. Interweaving past and present, private anecdote and public record, Stainton unfolds the story of this emblematic space, where for more than 250 years Americans scripted and rescripted their history. Staging Ground sheds light on issues that continue to form us as a people: the evolution of American culture and faith, the immigrant experience, the growth of cities, the emergence of women in art and society, the spread of advertising, the flowering of transportation and technology, and the abiding paradox of a nation founded on the principle of equality for “all men,” yet engaged in the slave trade and in the systematic oppression of the American Indian.
Download or read book Show Boat written by Edna Ferber and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic tale behind MGM’s blockbuster movie directed by George Sidney, starring Ava Gardner, Howard Keel, and Kathryn Grayson. Bringing to life the adventurous world of Mississippi show boats, the grittiness of turn-of-the-century Chicago, and the majesty of 1920s Broadway, Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber’s Show Boat is a classic. Magnolia Hawks spends her childhood aboard the Cotton Blossom, growing up amid simmering racial tension and struggling to survive life on the Mississippi. When she falls in love with the dashing Gaylord Ravenal and moves with him to Chicago, the joy of giving birth to their beautiful daughter, Kim, is offset by Gaylord’s gambling addiction and distrustful ways. Only when Kim sets off on her own to pursue success on the New York stage does Magnolia return to the Cotton Blossom, reflecting on her own life and all who once called the show boat their home. Originally published in 1926, adapted for the stage as a musical a year later and filmed three times over three decades, Show Boat brilliantly explores a nation going pivotal change through the lens of its popular culture. With a new foreword by Foster Hirsch. Vintage Movie Classics spotlights classic films that have stood the test of time, now rediscovered through the publication of the novels on which they were based.
Download or read book Mathews County written by Sara E. Lewis and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The proud rural charm and enchanting waterfront setting of Mathews are beloved features of this coastal county. Located on the northeast tip of the Tidewater region's Middle Peninsula, the land faces the winds and tides of the Chesapeake Bay head-on. Mathews is bordered by the Piankatank River to the north and the Mobjack Bay and its tributaries to the southwest. Home to powerful Powhatan Indians, it first was settled by Englishmen in the 17th century. The land was part of York and then Gloucester and became a separate county in 1791, renowned for its shipbuilding industry. Through the 21st century, Mathews County has served up fish and shellfish, vegetables and flowers, and music and crafts to neighbors, visitors, and merchants from other East Coast towns and beyond.
