Capital Entertainment: Stage Work and the Origins of the Creative Economy, 1822-1916

FAIN: FT-291687-23

Rachel Miller
College of Idaho (Caldwell, ID 83605-4432)

Research and writing of a history of the entertainment industry in the United States focusing on artisans, stage workers, and non-star performers during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Capital Entertainment: Stage Work and the Origins of the Creative Economy, 1822-1916 is the first monograph to analyze the rise of the U.S. entertainment industry with supporting players at center stage. More than just curious personalities in a niche business, non-star performers across genres ensured that the show went on and negotiated a new world of work arranged around trusts and syndicates. Stage workers began the nineteenth-century in small, self-organized groups of artisans, and they ended the century working inside one of the largest and earliest forms of global, export-oriented capitalism. In the process, they self-consciously attempted—and sometimes succeeded—to assert control over their employment conditions and the meaning of their work. In historicizing the creative economy as a conceptual and material relation rooted in the long nineteenth century, I how the industrialization of performance shaped how we understand and value the work of art today.