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Full-Text Articles in Women's History
In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin
In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …
Little Egypt: A Critical Biography, Katherine Vecchio
Little Egypt: A Critical Biography, Katherine Vecchio
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Structured as a biography, this thesis investigates the origins of Little Egypt—a stage name assumed by multiple women performing either the danse du ventre or the hoochie-coochie—and considers the character’s cultural legacy. The work draws on nineteenth and twentieth century newspapers, advertisements, photographs, and official publications and archival records from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Chapter one takes a new look at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and shows how the presence of dancers performing the danse du ventre on the Midway Pliasance was turned into a flashpoint of controversy by the popular press. This controversy would be key …
Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance And U.S. Musical Theatre, Phoebe Rumsey
Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance And U.S. Musical Theatre, Phoebe Rumsey
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In this dissertation, I claim the collective emotional connections and historical explorations characteristic of musical theatre constitute a nostalgic impulse dramaturgically inherent in the form. In my intervention in the link between nostalgia and musical theatre, I look to an area underrepresented in musical theatre scholarship: social dance. Through case studies that focus specifically on how social dance in musical theatre brings forth the dancer on stage as a site of embodied history, cultural memory, and nostalgia, I ask what social dance is doing in musical theatre and how the dancing body functions as a catalyst for nostalgic thinking for …