Day of Jubilee
The Great Age of Public Celebrations in New York, 1788-1909
Day of Jubilee: the Great Age of Public Celebrations in New York, 1788-1909 examines civic performances designed to honor prominent individuals, mark political events and issues of significance in New York City, or signal the completion of great projects that have touched the lives of New Yorkers. The great jubilees of recent years, including the ticker tape parades for the astronauts and championship sports teams and the annual May’s Thanksgiving Day parade, all drew on traditions established in the nineteenth century. Brooks McNamara sees these events as an extension of the traditional theatrical form. Although public celebrations take place outside of the playhouse, they are often loosely scripted, stage-managed, and performed by enormous casts—with an entire city as stage and auditorium. McNamara examines the evolution of the broad themes of popular pageantry, and the effects of the growing and changing population on these events. Through contemporary accounts and illustrations, readers can experience the excitement of Lafayette’s visit, the debut of Jenny Lind, and the first St. Patrick’s Day parade.
McNamara also traces the decline of the golden age of jubilees, high-lighting such factors as rising costs to the City, increasing traffic congestion, and alternative popular entertainment. Readers will ask: Is our society too big and too complex for public performances of togetherness? And if so we, he have found a better way to enact our appreciation of what we value?
Brooks McNamara is a professor in the Department of Performances Studies at New York University. He has written or edited a dozen books about theater and popular entertainment, including Step Right Up: A History of the American Medicine and The Shuberts on Broadway.
This is the first panoptic account of the many ways that New Yorkers took to the streets in acts of commemoration, celebration and mourning, ItÆs a work of wonderful scholarship and learning.
With incisive analysis, vivid description, and refreshing clarity, McNamara, in this generously illustrated study, breaks new ground in theatre scholarship. . . . He points the way for future investigations into this fascinating cultural, and very American, phenomenon, one not limited to New York City.
A masterful chronicle of how urban American shared their joys and sorrows in public. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, McNamara has re-created the communal festivities of a bygone Manhattan, and in the process cast light on New YorkÆs abiding enthusiasms, manias, and delusions.
Mcnamara has also worked as a visiting scholar at the Museum o f City of New York, where he has been an advisor to exhibitions to exhibitions on the theater. Most recently, he has advised o New York’s St. Patrick’s Day.
FOREWORD
ROBERT R. MACDONALD PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE: PUBLIC CELEBRATIONS AS PERFORMANCES
Part One
1 THE CONSTITUTION CELEBRATION AND THE WASHINGTON INAUGURATION, 1788, 1789
2 THREE ANNUAL CELEBRATIONS, C. 1819-1876
3 STATE VISITORS, I, 1824-1850
4 STATE VISITORS, II, 1851-1871
5 OPENINGS AND DEDICATIONS, 1825-1864
6 PARADES AND PUBLIC MOURNING, I, 1800-1865
Part Two
7 PARADES AND PUBLIC MOURNING, II, 1870-1897
8 FROM THE FOURTH OF JULY TO THE WASHINGTON CENTENNIAL, 1876-1889
9 FROM THE COLUMBIAN CELEBRATION TO HUDSON-FULTON, 1892-1909
EPILOGUE: GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, 1910 TO THE PRESENT
NOTES
SELECTED SOURCES
INDEX
