Introduction: From Celebration to Show Business
Selling and Seeing Curiosities
Routines: Songs, Speeches, Dialogue, and Farce
Commentary: Rise and Fall of "Slave" Creativity
Musical Comedy: Harrigan's Mulligan Guard
Confessions of an African American Minstrel
Plea for an American Drama
Classic Melodrama's Audiences
Ten-Twenty-Thirty Melodramas
"Leg Show" Burlesque Extravaganzas
Reactions to the Controversy
Extracts from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Programs
Journalists and the "New" Coney
Showmen and the "Amusement Business"
Two Critics of Coney's Banality