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Podcast: Today In History with The Retrospectors
Episode: Here Come The Minstrels
Description: Blackface performers The Virginia Minstrels - replete with white clown mouths, oversized tailcoats, and bookended by tambourine and bones players - first appeared on 6th February, 1843, at the New York Bowery Amphitheatre. They were an instant hit, but it wasn’t the first time a blackface act had been making (white) crowds laugh.American minstrelsy originated some 12 years earlier, when white performer Thomas ‘Daddy’ Rice first appeared as ‘Jim Crow’ - a comic parody of an elderly, disabled, enslaved African-American. His act proved so wildly popular the Boston Post reported that only Queen Victoria was a more crowd-plea...