AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon.(Book Review)
The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon. Melvin Patrick Ely. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Melvin Patrick Ely's perceptive, entertaining account of America's most popular radio program is back in print in this tenth anniversary edition. The book's volatile career since its original 1991 publication has now earned an explanatory preface describing the ambivalent public reaction to what is often perceived as an abhorrently racist program. Yet its enduring popularity, argues Ely, indicates that it deserves a fresh look, starting with its two creators. Ely illuminates the early twentieth-century history of amateur minstrel and vaudeville shows out of which came the live blackface act of Freeman Gosden (Amos) and Charles Correll (Andy), through meticulous archival research and personal interviews with family, friends, writers, and production staff of the radio and television shows.
Gosden and Correll's blackface creations went on-air in 1926 as Sam 'n' Henry over Chicago's WGN station. By 1928, the program had become Amos 'n' Andy, whose Chicago misadventures in the fraternal lodge of the Mystic Knights of the Sea became daily fare for millions after 1929, when the program went to NBC. By then, radio sales shot up and the show became "a powerful locomotive pulling all of commercial radio along behind it" (4) with its engaging serial format, contributing a range of consumer products and slang expressions to popular culture. Ely compellingly details the early days of serial radio from both listeners' and performers' perspectives. Eventually, the format changed the show into a weekly half-hour radio sitcom in the 1940s, and then a variety show before the radio program ended around 1960.
In 1951, Amos 'n' Andy was reinvented as a black-cast television program, over the formidable opposition of the NAACP, who eventually succeeded in driving the show off the air after two seasons (though not preventing its ...
- The cultural turn and a new social history: folk dance and the renovation of...
- Magazine article from: Journal of Social History Walkowitz, Daniel J. March 22, 2006 700+ words
...has largely disappeared as a useful category of analysis in social history, most especially for the social history of the recent past. While this is a problem general to social history, it is especially acute in the well-established field...
- Nuts about Pittsburgh. (Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
- Magazine article from: Artforum International Rimanelli, David September 1, 1994 700+ words
...pseudo-entitlement. The Andy Warhol Museum is located in...traditional notions of fine art and Andy's version of antiart, or between connoissuership and social history. Warhol's art hollows out...presentation of him preserves them. Andy the author and original is...
- Delight: the Yorkshire Sculpture Park celebrates thirty years with new work by...
- Magazine article from: The Architectural Review Dawson, Julia Jackson, Lynne May 1, 2007 700+ words
Twenty years ago, when Andy Goldsworthy was artist in residence...Goldsworthy is fascinated by the social history of landscape and the act of making...anniversary year. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Andy Goldsworthy, Yorkshire Sculpture Park...
- Where Warhol failed. (Andy Warhol: A Retrospective)
- Magazine article from: The New Leader Bloch, Bradley W. March 20, 1989 700+ words
Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA...drugs and rock 'n' roll worldview during a turbulent period of American social history. This is understandable, yet it obscures what he accomplished, as well...
- Social history in Europe.(Introducing The Issues)
- Magazine article from: Journal of Social History Kaelble, Hartmut September 22, 2003 700+ words
1. The current situation of social history Social history in Europe has passed through a period of changes and...or so. The general public became less interested in social history than in the 1960's and 1970's. Social history...
- Social history present and future.(Introducing The Issues)
- Magazine article from: Journal of Social History Stearns, Peter N. September 22, 2003 700+ words
Social history has often had its temperature taken...opportunities to define the "new social history" to teachers and others now a bit...was it something different from social history, even a danger to it, or rather...
- New approaches to social history. Myth, memory, and place: Monmouth and Bath...
- Magazine article from: Journal of Social History Borsay, Peter March 22, 2006 700+ words
1. A Hard and Soft Social History In the post-war decades in Britain, social history, in what may be called its heroic age...in approach from a "hard" to a "soft" social history. Much of the social history of the heroic...
- What is leftist about social history today?(Special Issue: Social History and...
- Magazine article from: Journal of Social History Kocka, Juergen February 5, 1996 700+ words
What is leftist about social history? Why should conservatives be smore critical of social history than, for example, intellectual, political...Answers may differ with the concept of social history one subscribes to, and with the historiographical...
- Losses, gains and opportunities: social history today.(Introducing The Issues)
- Magazine article from: Journal of Social History Kocka, Juergen September 22, 2003 700+ words
...his famous proclamation of optimism. Social history seems to have gone through a long period...nobody would nowadays characterize social history the way it was characterized by Hans...irony and sympathy he remarked that social history has become a nebulous code for everything...
- Perfecting institutionalization: the foundation of the International Social...
- Magazine article from: Journal of Social History Tomka, Bela June 22, 2007 700+ words
...other academic fields. As for the social history these attributes have already existed...however, the institutionalization of social history was not complete until recently. There...the journal (International Review of Social History). International social history ...