Violet McNeal ran away from her family’s rural Minnesota farm in the late 1880s and fell under the spell of conman and patent medicine “doctor” Will Archimbauld who hooked her on opium and promises of fame and fortune. Violet soon learned to become Princess Lotus Blossom and was the best pitchman, nostrum seller, and conwoman to roam the west in a torch-lit wagon. Four White Horses and a Brass Band is Violet’s story of life on the road with the medicine show and reveal the secrets of conman’s trade. Sick and nearly dead with addiction by age 30, she submits to the tortures of withdrawal and the “cure” to create a new life. First published in 1947, the Feral House edition features an extensive afterword on the history of the patent medicine trade and evolution of the lure of miracle cures and healers. Also included are a glossary of the grifter’s cant and samples of scripts used by Violet and other infamous “doctors”.

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities. Significantly, notes Browder, these ersatz autobiographies have tended to appear at flashpoints in American history: in the decades before the Civil War, when immigration laws and laws regarding Native Americans were changing in the 1920s, and during the civil rights era, for example. Examining the creation and reception of such works from the 1830s through the 1990s--against a background ranging from the abolition movement and Wild West shows to more recent controversies surrounding blackface performance and jazz music--Browder uncovers their surprising influence in shaping American notions of identity.

Here is the fascinating though ofttimes shady history of the medicine show, an American show-business institution that dispensed hoopla and nostrums to a credulous clientele. When medicine shows died out, the nation lost one of its most rollicking entertainments.

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Addresses the ways that theatre both shapes cross-cultural dialogue and is itself, in turn, shaped by those forces. Globalization may strike many as a phenomenon of our own historical moment, but it is truly as old as civilization: we need only look to the ancient Silk Road linking the Far East to the Mediterranean in order to find some of the earliest recorded impacts of people and goods crossing borders. Yet, in the current cultural moment, tensions are high due to increased migration, economic unpredictability, complicated acts of local and global terror, and heightened political divisions all over the world. Thus globalization seems new and a threat to our ways of life, to our nations, and to our cultures. In what ways have theatre practitioners, educators, and scholars worked to support cross-cultural dialogue historically? And in what ways might theatre embrace the complexities and contradictions inherent in any meaningful exchange? The essays in Theatre Symposium, Volume 25 reflect on these questions. Featured in Theatre Symposium, Volume 25 “Theatre as Cultural Exchange: Stages and Studios of Learning” by Anita Gonzalez “Certain Kinds of Dances Used among Them: An Initial Inquiry into Colonial Spanish Encounters with the Areytos of the Taíno in Puerto Rico” by E. Bert Wallace “Gertrude Hoffmann’s Lawful Piracy: ‘A Vision of Salome’ and the Russian Season as Transatlantic Production Impersonations” by Sunny Stalter-Pace “Greasing the Global: Princess Lotus Blossom and the Fabrication of the ‘Orient’ to Pitch Products in the American Medicine Show” by Chase Bringardner “Dismembering Tennessee Williams: The Global Context of Lee Breuer’s A Streetcar Named Desire” by Daniel Ciba “Transformative Cross-Cultural Dialogue in Prague: Americans Creating Czech History Plays” by Karen Berman “Finding Common Ground: Lessac Training across Cultures” by Erica Tobolski and Deborah A. Kinghorn