Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Timeline: beginnings to 1870
- 1 American theatre in context, from the beginnings to 1870
- 2 Structure and management in the American theatre from the beginning to 1870
- 3 Plays and playwrights
- Plays and playwrights: to 1800
- Plays and playwrights: 1800–1865
- 4 The Actors
- 5 Scenography, stagecraft, and architecture in the American theatre: beginnings to 1870
- 6 Paratheatricals and popular stage entertainment
- Bibliography
Plays and playwrights: 1800–1865
from 3 - Plays and playwrights
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Timeline: beginnings to 1870
- 1 American theatre in context, from the beginnings to 1870
- 2 Structure and management in the American theatre from the beginning to 1870
- 3 Plays and playwrights
- Plays and playwrights: to 1800
- Plays and playwrights: 1800–1865
- 4 The Actors
- 5 Scenography, stagecraft, and architecture in the American theatre: beginnings to 1870
- 6 Paratheatricals and popular stage entertainment
- Bibliography
Summary
Introduction
For those living during the transition, more than a new century seemed to dawn with the year 1801. Twelve years of centralizing, pro-British Federalist government was giving way to a new era. The ascendant Democrat-Republicans promised a reorienting of the nation’s political, economic, social, and cultural agendas. But despite Federalist fears of a wholesale dismantling of federal power and an embracing of radical French republicanism, the new cast of political leaders, epitomized by Thomas Jefferson, remained fundamentally committed to the established government infrastructure, to gentry governance, and to the preservation of republican virtue. As Robert Wiebe has noted, though members of both political parties saw their differences in stark contrasts, their dissimilarities were finally struggles “over the interior design of the same ideological house” (xiii). Though often distanced by both temperament and class from those they governed, this new leadership was destined to oversee a new wave of westward migration into the territories of the Old Northwest and the Louisiana Purchase, the United States’s tentative forays into international politics, and a second war with Britain. In turn, Jackson and his successors would grapple with the shift of political power to the frontier, the expansion of a commercial economy, the “Indian question,” an influx of new immigration and the consequent growth of cities, the emergence of irreconcilable sectional rivalries, and, eventually, a civil war that would irreversibly set the national course by ending slavery and establishing the primacy of the Union over the states.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of American Theatre , pp. 250 - 302Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
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