Overview

A groundbreaking history, decades in the making, that chronicles how blackface dominated American society culturally, financially, and racially for nearly two centuries. Never before has the disturbing story of blackface and its piercing reflection of American society been so comprehensively told. Darkology, from Princeton historian Rhae Lynn Barnes, meticulously unravels this complex, subterranean, and all-too-often expunged history. By 1830, blackface, which caricatured ex-slaves for their supposed subservience and happy demeanor, had become a venomous cultural export. Blackface theater soon segued into everyday amateur shows, with minstrelsy proliferating in Elks Clubs, churches, universities, and schools during Jim Crow, whose name derives from minstrelsy's founding character. Beloved by presidents including FDR and Gerald Ford, blackface saturated twentieth-century America, permeating US military bases abroad and World War II Japanese American internment camps as an ""Americanization"" tool. Despite a 1950s backlash led by Black mothers protesting public school performances, 1960s college students from California to Vermont aggressively challenged legal bans. With its gripping writing and penetrating archival research, Darkology is a landmark work that peers beneath the historical boulders that deliberately obscure our racial past.

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Rhae Lynn Barnes is an assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton University and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Along with a diverse career on stage and screen, Susan Hanfield is a prolific audiobook narrator with hundreds of titles to her credit. Susan is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner, three-time Audie Award finalist, and a Voice Arts Awards nominee. From her professional studio in Los Angeles, Susan's favorite fiction genres include literary fiction, historical romance, young adult, and science fiction/fantasy. Nonfiction genres include faith-based/inspirational, personal self-development, and business. Susan is known for her wide range of voices, accents, intonations, and her ability to bring the written story to life. Patryce Williams is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City and is a member of the Actors' Equity Association. She is the lead vocalist and executive producer for the band The Quiet Stars, formally known as SUM. Earning a BFA in theater at Central Connecticut State University, Patryce has lent her talents touring regional theater and singing on world-renowned stages such as the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage. With a passion for reading since she first discovered novels via The Baby-Sitters Club, Patryce has since grown to love books of all kinds, including modern literature, rom com, and self-development. Her favorite job to date is serving as her son Jackson's exclusive narrator.

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