Spectacular Men

Download or read book Spectacular Men written by Sarah E. Chinn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Spectacular Men, Sarah E. Chinn investigates how working class white men looked to the early American theatre for examples of ideal manhood. Theatre-going was the primary source of entertainment for working people of the early Republic and the Jacksonian period, and plays implicitly and explicitly addressed the risks and rewards of citizenship. Ranging from representations of the heroes of the American Revolution to images of doomed Indians to plays about ancient Rome, Chinn unearths dozens of plays rarely read by critics. Spectacular Men places the theatre at the center of the self-creation of working white men, as voters, as workers, and as Americans.