Since Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988), historians have answered questions about culture and class in the nineteenth-century United States with the split between sacralized art and popular amusement. Yet this was never the most salient division for performers, who crossed genres out of necessity and critiqued the exploitative practices of an industry that spoke like Shakespeare but operated like Standard Oil. This paper offers a different approach, centering the operations of the first talent agencies as a way to understand the conditions that enabled Gilded Age entertainment monopolies to flourish. Thus far ignored by historians, these agencies were founded in the 1860s to route female vocalists and dancers through variety circuits. Within two decades, however, orchestra players and tragedians alike used agencies, which altered how non-celebrity players pitched themselves to employers and made claims for the value of their effort.
Rachel Miller is an Assistant Professor of History at the College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho. This talk is adapted from her current manuscript, “Capital Entertainment: Stage Work and the Origins of the U.S. Creative Economy, 1821 – 1912.” Rachel received a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Rutgers University and the American Antiquarian Society.
Due to pandemic restrictions, the seminar will be held on Zoom. The seminar is free and open to all.