List of musical examples -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Revisiting minstrelsy's history: the playbill and contextual evidence -- the playbills -- Blackface parodies of American speech and rhetoric: burlesque lectures and sermons, political orations, comic dialogues, and stories -- Opera for the masses: burlesques of English and Italian opera -- Ethiopian sketches of American life: skits, farces, and afterpieces -- Blackface minstrelsy, masculinity, and social rituals in vocal and choral repertories -- Blackface minstrelsy and misogyny in vocal and choral repertories -- Conclusion -- Appendixes -- Representative minstrel companies and personnel in playbills and newspaper advertisements, 1843-60 -- Representative concluding numbers from selected minstrel shows, 1843-60 -- Song text frequency in selected Antebellum songsters -- Notes -- Works cited -- Index.