| FT-291687-23 | Research: Summer Stipends | Rachel Miller | Capital Entertainment: Stage Work and the Origins of the Creative Economy, 1822-1916 | 6/1/2023 - 7/31/2023 | $6,000.00 | Rachel | | Miller | | | | College of Idaho | Caldwell | ID | 83605-4432 | USA | 2023 | U.S. History | Summer Stipends | Research | 6000 | 0 | 6000 | 0 | 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. |