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.

Articles by this Author

Blackface: the Sad History of Minstrel Shows, Winter 2019 | Vol. 64, No. 1

For most of the 1800s, whites in blackface performed in widely popular minstrel shows, creating racist stereotypes that endured for more than a century.

Behind the Blackface, April/May 1978 | Vol. 29, No. 3

In the 19th Century, white performers invented the minstrel show, the first uniquely American entertainment form

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