| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kathryn J. Oberdeck. The Evangelist and the Impresario: Religion, Entertainment, and Cultural Politics in America, 1884–1914. (New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1999. Pp. xiii, 429. $34.95.

Kathryn J. Oberdeck's ambitious and fascinating book offers a new approach to the old question "What is culture?" While historians have closely studied how intellectuals such as Jane Addams and Franz Boas addressed this question around the century's turn, few have seen vaudeville or evangelical Christianity as sources of contributions to that debate rather than as objects of it. By examining the intersecting careers of Irish-born Christian socialist Alexander Irvine and Italian-American vaudeville impresario Sylvester Poli, Oberdeck illuminates debates over class and culture, as well as cross-cutting conflicts over gender, ethnicity, and race, "from the bottom up," as Irvine titled one of his memoirs. Not a dual biography, the book instead traces the "cultural trajectories" (p. 4) of the two men's careers, drawing out their implications for changing conventions in the represention of class and cultural difference. Oberdeck aims not to answer the question of what culture "was" or "is" but to untangle the knotted origins of twentieth-century cultural politics. . . .

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