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American Musicals in Context: From the American Revolution to the 21st Century gives students a fresh look at history-based musicals, helping readers to understand the American story through one of the country's most celebrated art forms: the musical.
With the hit musical
Hamilton (2015) captivating audiences and reshaping the way early U.S. history is taught and written about, this book offers insight into an array of musicals that explore U.S. history. The work provides a synopsis, overview of critical and audience reception, and historical context and analysis for each of 20 musicals selected for the unique and illuminating way they present the American story on the stage.
Specifically, this volume explores musicals that have centered their themes, characters, and plots on some aspect of America's complex and ever-changing history. Each in its own way helps us rediscover pivotal national crises, key political decisions, defining moral choices, unspeakable and unresolved injustices, important and untold stories, defeats suffered, victories won in the face of monumental adversity, and the sacrifices borne publicly and privately in the process of creating the American narrative, one story at a time. Students will come away from the volume armed with the critical thinking skills necessary to discern fact from fiction in U.S. history.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chronology
Allegiance (2012)
American Idiot (2009)
Atomic (2013)
Ben Franklin in Paris (1964)
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2008)
The Civil War (1999)
The Cradle Will Rock (1937)
Dearest Enemy (1925)
Falsettos (1992)
Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical (1967)
Hamilton: An American Musical (2015)
I'd Rather Be Right (1937)
Newsies (2011)
Parade (1998)
Ragtime (1996)
Raisin (1973)
The Scottsboro Boys (2010)
1776 (1969, rev. 1997)
Shenandoah (1974)
War Paint (2016)
About the Author and Contributors
Index
About the author
Thomas Allen Greenfield is Professor of English and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Bellarmine College. He is a member of the national board of the Federation of State Humanities Councils. Greenfield's first book Work and the Work Ethic in American Drama, 1920-1970 was published in 1982.
