| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America. By Karen Sotiropoulos. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. xvi, 288 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-674-01940-7.)

In this engaging and well-written book, Karen Sotiropoulos examines the history of black performers in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The growing popularity of vaudeville during that period provided black artists with new opportunities to express themselves creatively and earn a comfortable living. But, as Sotiropoulos shows, it also gave them a unique vehicle for challenging the racist stereotypes of white Americans and the accommodationist political strategies of some black leaders. She contends that artists such as Bert Williams, George Walker, and Aida Overton Walker used vaudeville and the era's other commercial amusements to advance a modern black identity based on professional achievement and personal respectability.

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