bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
1874–1875
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The 1874-75 season proved to be an exceedingly rewarding one, brimming over with an enlivening variety of superior plays and productions. If fewer dramas and comedies appeared before the footlights than in preceding seasons, that mattered little and was easily explained. First of all, with hard times persisting a demand for totally escapist entertainments grew, so many stages were turned over to less intellectually exhausting musicals and vaudevilles. Second, the season enjoyed more long runs than any previous theatrical year. The result was that playhouses had less need for rapid turnovers. Indeed, for all practical purposes New York had only five firstclass auditoriums devoted to nonmusicals, although such lesser houses as the Bowery and Wood’s Museum continued to offer patrons a steady program of works that would have instant appeal to less particular playgoers.
1877–1878
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Two hugely successful foreign plays and a cadre of luminous stars provided the happiest theatrical news in this largely lackluster season, although several American plays were not without merit or interest. But the good news was interwoven with bad. Just as the effects of the 1873 panic finally seemed to be disappearing, newly organized labor decided to flex its muscles, and railroad strikes spread across the country. If New York City theatres were not as dependent on tourists as they would be in later years, business nonetheless had to be hurt. More important, railroads carried scenery and actors from place to place in days when every city and town of any real size had one or more legitimate theatres.
1882–1883
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
For dedicated playgoers the new season, like the one just gone by, must have been not uninteresting, even if it was largely undistinguished. The incessant winds of change blew more forcefully and, for careful observers, more noticeably. Several inescapable landmarks signaled evolving tastes and the American theatre’s timely response to this evolution. In October New York’s Casino Theatre opened its doors for the first time.
1887–1888
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Quite probably a majority of playgoers sat through the 1887-88 season reasonably satisfied with what they saw and heard. Gallery gods could still hiss ebony-black, snarling villains and still cheer heroes rescuing heroines from a blaze of illuminated tinsel and stage smoke. At the same time, thanks to new, smaller theatres and to stages brightened by electricity, the exaggerated writing and acting so dear to excitable newsboys and their fellow ragamuffin noisemakers was disappearing rapidly from smarter houses. In those, a better-dressed and bettermannered clientele, who could afford the betterlocated seats, applauded a handful of aging, traditionalist stars returning year after year in their aged, traditional repertory. They also enjoyed surviving stock ensembles (which now made only token bows to the classics) and a rising type of specially cast and mounted production. For the most part the plays both audiences saw were relatively new.
1888–1889
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
If summer dog days cramped theatricals, they could not totally discourage them. Established stars and stock players might desert the sweltering city for cooler haunts at the seashore or in the mountains, but managers continued to keep theatres open and more or less profitable, attempting to lure determined entertainment seekers with promises of icecooled air (barely perceptible), with mountings of plays deemed too uncertain for the height of the season, and with up-and-coming players anxious for a better chance in the limelight. As often as not, this was the time when newer American plays were given an opportunity. Actually, though many contemporary commentators failed to grasp the fact, important young American playwrights were coming increasingly to the fore. By now Steele MacKaye and Bronson Howard were well established, but James A. Herne, Augustus Thomas, William Gillette, Henry C. de Mille, and David Belasco also were carving out enduring niches for themselves. Gillette again had shown his mettle at the close of the previous season. De Mille and Belasco had a new play ready to launch the coming one.
1889–1890
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Odell labeled the new theatrical year “a very brilliant season.” Of course, he was writing about it more than half a century afterwards, and he was writing about the stage of his youth, which almost always seems better when looked back on with age’s tinted memory. Odell was an affectionate chronicler of the era, and he earlier had called the late 1870s Broadway’s palmiest days. Such assessments were tinged with absurdity even in the 1930s and early 1940s, when he made them. Now, another halfcentury later, despite myriad reevaluations of the Victorian period and its arts, they still seem questionable. Unfortunately, the performances and productions have vanished beyond recall, and in any case we would be inclined to judge them, if we could watch them, by standards that were not the standards of their contemporaries.
1891–1892
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
To call the 1891-92 season unimportant would be to condemn it with a gratuitous severity. On its musical stages it saw, first, in Robin Hood the appearance of the earliest American work to enjoy a long, respected afterlife and, almost immediately following, in A Trip to Chinatown the American work that more than any other moved farce-comedy into the realm of modern musical comedy. It also witnessed, if only for a single matinee, the breakaway drama that introduced lbsenite influences into native dramaturgy. For dedicated playgoers it brought forth any number of evenings of more than passing interest. Yet on the whole, it can fairly be termed lackluster. Truly exciting nights seemed fewer and farther between than in many superior seasons, both before and since. Nonetheless, even with these caveats in mind, the season secured itself a minor place in American theatrical history, for it served as a small, rickety bridge between eras, the one ending with the death of Barrett and the retirement of Booth, and the other beginning with the opening of a major new theatre.
1895–1896
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Recovery from the panic of 1893 had been remarkably swift. By late summer of 1895 business was rosy almost everywhere, and theatrical columns, offering their predictions for the new season, were universally optimistic. The Dramatic Mirror echoed a prevailing sentiment when it prophesied that the new theatrical year would be one of the best ever, though it quickly added “from a pecuniary point of view.” One sign of resurgence did not sit well with all crystal-ball readers. Four major theatres announced, virtually in unison, that they intended to raise the top ticket price from $1.50, where it had been since the Civil War, to $2.00. Their reasoning was that higher prices would make theatregoing “higher toned.” Dissenters dismissed such rationalization as self-serving. But their cries were lost in a swelling of production records and the building of new playhouses.
1897–1898
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Theatre business had become spotty the preceding spring and plummeted alarmingly during the summer. Looking for a reason or a scapegoat, pontificators pointed an accusing finger at “the bicycle craze,” which found many potential playgoers pedaling merrily in the balmy weather instead of crowding into cramped, often sizzling theatres. In March of 1898 the Maine was blown up. A month later we were at war with Spain. After a brief spell during which Americans were preoccupied with the new war, box offices again were confronted with the old, accustomed lines. Yet the rage for bicycling persisted, leaving the commentators baffled but happily counting their profits. Another reason-an ineluctable change of tastes-may have accounted for some of the falling off.
1899–1900
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The seasons from 1899-1900 through 1913-14 witnessed an open, incessant struggle by native playwrights to take over American stages they felt rightly belonged to them. They battled relentlessly against producers who were not unsympathetic to their claims but who regularly, and perhaps understandably, sought safety in proven importations. Their battle was an unwritten drama in itself. Initially, to get a foot in the stage door, they may have seemed to compromise by crafting, more often than not, American vehicles for American stars. But this was still a common practice in many of the world’s theatre capitals. The era of the star vehicle continued, albeit it was soon to come crashing down. Of course, there would be exceptions. Fitch’s The Climbers and several of his other dramas were notable instances. Compromise also took the form of setting a seemingly inordinate number of their plays overseas, especially in England.
1902–1903
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Despite the disappointing season just passed, optimism ran rampant along the Great White Way. No better sign of this existed than the construction busily under way from the bottom to the top of the fast-expanding theatre district. From Fourteenth Street to Columbus Circle no fewer than eight new playhouses were rising. Some would have short, difficult lives, but others-such as the new Lyceum, the Hudson, and the New Amsterdam-would have long, distinguished careers. Producers were eagerly scanning rosters for young players they could proclaim as stars, and they were also avidly searching for star vehicles. The play was still not the thing in this era.
1903–1904
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Optimism continued to help brighten Broadway’s lights. Just after the season got under way, Theatre published its predictions for the ensuing months. One indisputably happy fact was that six theatres that had been rising were ready to open their doors. Their stages, and others, had been promised not only some eagerly awaited London and Continental hits but an “unprecedently large” number of Shakespearean revivals. On the down side, although the article made no judgments, was word that the “list of dramatized novels . . . is longer than ever”; more discouraging, “very few new plays by American authors” were on the slate.
1909–1910
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A season of exceptional, sustained interest rarely is followed by an equally exciting season. If 1909-10 was hardly as brilliant as its prececessor, it was by no means a weak one. Its theatrical comings and goings were constantly newsworthy. Among the goingsfor all practical purposes, among the gones-was the all but total disappearance of touring melodrama, along with the conversion to films, or in a few cases to other purposes, of theatres which once had hosted them. Touring melodramas had evolved slowly and naturally from the need to entertain the lower classes; they disappeared quickly but just as naturally when these same playgoers found cheaper and in some ways better diversions. The plays never had added anything to dramatic literature.
1911–1912
Authors: Bordman Gerald 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Optimism abounded as the new season got under way. Theatre’s lead article in September was a survey of forthcoming months, framed by miniature photographs of thirty starred players, from such oldtimers as Sothern and Drew to such youngsters as Grace George, Alla Nazimova, and Billie Burke. The article branded the new term as “unusually promising” and went on to assert, “The challenge for native plays of superior merit has been answered was performed in virtual darkness until the last moment.
The Depression Era (1933-1939)
Authors: Dinnerstein Leonard 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Initially, antisemitic displays in the United States did not increase with the onset of the Great Depression. But after 1933, when a Nazi-led government came to power in Germany and Franklin D. Roosevelt inaugurated a New Deal at home, the deepening economic crisis contributed to an explosion of unprecedented antisemitic fervor. Fueled also by the rise of Protestant and Catholic demagogues, deeply entrenched Protestant fundamentalism, and the widespread expression of antisemitic attitudes by respectable social and religious leaders, they illustrated how centuries of denigrating Jews culminated in the most savage accusations, and in some urban areas-especially New York and Boston-violent physical attacks. In the 1930s American antisemitism was “more virulent and more vicious than at any time before or since” as rabid antisemites, almost without exception, envisioned an international Jewish conspiracy aimed at controlling the government of the United States. They believed that unless maximum vigilance was exercised, Christian America would be lost.
Marxism and the Left Laying the Foundations
Authors: Eley Geoff 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
This sense of forward movement was a far cry from the crushing isolation of the 1850s, when Marx began his critique of capitalism. After three years of plotting, barricades, fiery journalism, and unremitting revolutionary excitement during 1848–50, Marx found himself stranded in decidedly unrevolutionary London, surrounded by the disappointments of exile and defeat, suffering the hardships of penury, ill health, and family loss.
The Rise of Labor Movements
Authors: Eley Geoff 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The 1860s sowed the seeds of organization. Some party foundations coalesced from earlier initiatives, as in Germany, where the SPD’s two tributaries dated from 1863. Others anticipated things to come, as in Britain and the tsarist empire, where stronger foundations came only around 1900. Others still led a marginal or semiclandestine existence before 1914, as in Iberia, the Balkans, and most of eastern Europe. But these were all social democratic parties, distinct from other strands of the Left, like anarchist or syndicalist movements, radical democratic parties, peasant parties, or the populist Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia (see table 4.1). They were parties aligning themselves with the Second International formed in 1889, consciously identifying with the legacy of Karl Marx.
Breaking the Mold of Socialism
Authors: Eley Geoff 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Russian extremes created chances for the Left that weren’t available elsewhere in Europe. Some wartime circumstances were generic—notably, the labor movement’s incorporation via patriotism, bringing gains for leaders but hardships for the rank and file. But in other ways, Russian circumstances were least like the others, because the thinness of civil society left Russia exceptionally vulnerable to generalized breakdown, which the West’s more developed institutional resources forestalled.
Remolding Militancy
Authors: Eley Geoff 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
I left the international initiatives of European socialism in early 1917, stymied in Stockholm. The northern neutrals vainly confronted the anti Germanism of the British, French, and Belgian socialists, hoping to revive the pre-1914 Second International. The Zimmerwald movement looked for a renewal of revolutionary politics but without breaking irrevocably with the past. Both were focused on Russia, where the Left’s revolutionary prestige had increasingly become the standard.
Stalinism And Western Marxism
Authors: Eley Geoff 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
During 1917–21, the left became permanently split between those who joined the Third International and those who did not. For Communists, Soviet events played an ever more decisive part, proceeding from the power struggle surrounding Lenin’s illness and death in 1923–24. The factional maneuvering—which first isolated Trotsky and then broke the authority of Kamenev and Zinoviev, while relentlessly concentrating power around Stalin—profoundly influenced how Communism elsewhere would be shaped. In particular, Stalin produced the new thesis of “Socialism in One Country,” which claimed, for the first time, that socialism could be built without revolution in the West. This line was taken up by others, hardening into a system within the year.
Fascism and Popular Front
Authors: Eley Geoff 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
By 1930 the left’s prospects were bleak. Despite apocalyptic wagers on the world crash, out-and-out revolutionaries remained minorities in their national movements, even, as in the KPD, where they enjoyed mass support. Socialist parties were further from power than ever, while even the scaled-down hopes authorized by the post1918 settlements wore thin.
"The Inherent Property of Liberty"
Authors: Jones Howard 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The first round of the abolitionists' struggle in the Amistad case took place in the United States Circuit Court meeting in Connecticut. The blacks' attorneys hoped to convince the presiding judges, Associate Justice Smith Thompson from the United States Supreme Court and Andrew T. Judson from the district court, that the circuit court lacked jurisdiction in a case where natural law was the guiding principle and that there was nothing to warrant a grand-jury indictment for either murder or piracy. They first tried to secure a separate writ of habeas corpus for the three girls; this would force the prosecution to bring formal charges against them, or see the court excuse them from appearing as witnesses in the case. Their release would result in a courtroom confrontation between the black captives, who had attracted considerable public favor, and the two Spaniards, who had not. Furthermore, the writ would serve as a license to bring into debate the entire question of human rights and property rights pertaining to slavery. If the abolitionists could show that there was no legal basis for holding the youths, they would expand the argument to include the other blacks. If they could establish that the captives were human beings and not property, no one could have property or salvage claims on them and the blacks could go free. Most important, the abolitionists could exert pressure on the Van Buren administration to change its stand on the issue.
"A National Matter"
Authors: Jones Howard 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The legal process begun by the abolitionists in Hartford now entered its second phase: the battle in the district court over whether the Amistad blacks were slaves and therefore the property of Ruiz and Monies. If it could be established that the blacks were not property, both Lieutenant Gedney and the United States marshal in Connecticut would have acted illegally and the Spaniards would have no legitimate claims. To undermine the property argument, the abolitionists would have to establish that the captives, by Spanish laws and treaties, were not slaves. They could not argue against human bondage on the basis of its alleged immorality; Judge Thompson had made that clear. They now intended to make the case a national concern and then seek changes through the legal system that would undermine slavery and promote their ideals.
"The Eternal Principles of Justice"
Authors: Jones Howard 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland had gained a reputation for protecting national supremacy while also safeguarding the rights of states, individuals, and property. These stances were not always compatible and necessitated compromise decisions. But a compromise in the Amistad case could only leave the captives as casualties and the abolitionists' objectives unfulfilled. The abolitionists feared that the justices would opt to protect national supremacy and decide against the blacks. The easiest way out of the morass, a way that would affirm the administration's position without challenging the states' rights position, would be to award the blacks to the Spanish minister. If unity depended upon keeping arguments over slavery to a minimum, the Court would surely prefer that course.
The Passenger Train Creates Modern America
Authors: Martin Albro 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The depopulation of the countryside by the industrial revolution, which so troubled the English, did not take place in the United States, although the character of the population changed dramatically. A growing tendency for farm boys (and more and more girls) to forsake the land for the rising urban centers was apparent by the turn of the century, and it alarmed a few old-timers like James J. Hill, who saw in it a fatuous belief on the part of young people that they could “live without working.” But most Americans were proud of the transformation of villages into towns and towns into ambitious cities—a trend that would last as long as the railroad train was the chief mode of intercity transportation. Most people saw in such trends nothing less than the march of progress across what had been, within the memory of many still living in 1920, an empty, inviting landscape. The passenger train, which so many historians have seen as “knitting together” localities into a national whole, did no such thing. It rather created those local and regional centers, in the process of creating a highly vertebrate nation that by the early twentieth century had achieved an efficiency and trustworthiness of travel, transport, and communication that would not survive the emergence of the automobile and its suburbs. Reflecting upon the fact that it was the railroads that created the heavy industry that made universal ownership of cars possible, we can see how the passenger train contained the seeds of its own destruction. In its day, however, which lasted almost a century, the train was as totally in command of national mobility as the car has been since.
From Entrepreneurs to Managers: The Founding Years
Authors: Martin Albro 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A railroad is an expensive, complex machine, spread out over vaster distances than one mind can comprehend at a single moment, programmed to do many things in many different places, at the direction of many different people. It either works right, or it hardly works at all, and when it does not it can be disastrous for both human life and property. That railroad leaders worked out the knotty problems of human relations which this proposition implies, however slowly and painfully, and not without some grand failures, is one of the most significant contributions of the railroad to the evolution of American social institutions.
It’s All Politics!
Authors: Martin Albro 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The old century went out with a bang, after all. It really ended in 1897, when the inauguration of William McKinley as president of the United States—after an unpleasant dalliance with the Democrats under Grover Cleveland—resumed the nearly unbroken tradition of Republican presidents that had begun with Abraham Lincoln. A fast-growing America, welcoming each year thousands of sturdy, intelligent, industrious immigrants to her shores, went back to work with gusto, and soon a wave of prosperity and self-renewing optimism swept through the land. William Jennings Bryan spoke Populist cant out of one side of his mouth as he rode the campaign trail in 1896, but a majority preferred the philosophy of McKinley’s front-porch campaign, which emphasized more for everybody. The Republican view of human nature won the day. The middle class, which included the skilled workers and affluent farmers (in both cases they were the ones who voted) wanted their youthful industries and expanding farm frontiers protected by the tariff and they wanted “good hard mun,” as one Swede put it, in the form of the honest gold dollar.