Book Review

Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. By W. T. Lhamon Jr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-674-01062-0 (cloth). Pp. xi, 459. $39.95.

"Jim Crow": today the name most often evokes the hateful segregation laws that first swept the nation in the decades following the Civil War. But by examining the theatrical character from whom the name is drawn, W. T. Lhamon reveals meanings significantly different from those commonly attributed to it today. For in the song, dance, and theatrics of this nineteenth-century icon of international popular culture, Jim Crow challenged the emerging divisions of race and class and the growing authority of an elite increasingly bent on subduing this early American trickster.