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Robert C. Toll


Robert C. Toll is the author of Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1974) and On With the Show!: The First Century of Show Business in America (Oxford University Press, 1976). Much of the material in this article is adapted from those two books.

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Edwin

Grosvenor

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For most of the 1800s, whites in blackface performed in widely popular minstrel shows, creating racist stereotypes that endured for more than a century.
In the 19th Century, white performers invented the minstrel show, the first uniquely American entertainment form