page_title: The Octoroon
hierarchical_section_title: The Octoroon
caption_attribution_description: English: Print of The Octoroon, Act IV, at The Winter Garden Theatre, 1859.
context_page_description: The Octoroon is a play by Dion Boucicault that opened in 1859 at The Winter Garden Theatre, New York City. Extremely popular, the play was kept running continuously for years by seven road companies. Among antebellum melodramas, it was considered second in popularity only to Uncle Tom's Cabin.
  Boucicault adapted the play from the novel The Quadroon by Thomas Mayne Reid. It concerns the residents of a Louisiana plantation called Terrebonne, and sparked debates about the abolition of slavery and the role of theatre in politics. It contains elements of Romanticism and melodrama.
  The word octoroon signifies a person of one-eighth African ancestry. In comparison, a quadroon would have one quarter African ancestry and a mulatto for the most part has historically implied half African ancestry.
  The Oxford English Dictionary cites The Octoroon with the earliest record of the word "mashup" with the quote: "He don't understand; he speaks a mash up of Indian, French, and Mexican."
context_section_description: The Octoroon is a play by Dion Boucicault that opened in 1859 at The Winter Garden Theatre, New York City. Extremely popular, the play was kept running continuously for years by seven road companies. Among antebellum melodramas, it was considered second in popularity only to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).
  Boucicault adapted the play from the novel The Quadroon by Thomas Mayne Reid (1856). It concerns the residents of a Louisiana plantation called Terrebonne, and sparked debates about the abolition of slavery and the role of theatre in politics. It contains elements of Romanticism and melodrama.
  The word octoroon signifies a person of one-eighth African ancestry. In comparison, a quadroon would have one quarter African ancestry and a mulatto for the most part has historically implied half African ancestry.
  The Oxford English Dictionary cites The Octoroon with the earliest record of the word "mashup" with the quote: "He don't understand; he speaks a mash up of Indian, French, and Mexican." (Boucicault's manuscript actually reads "Indian, French and 'Merican."  The last word, an important colloquialism, was misread by the typesetter of the play.)
caption: The Octoroon, Act IV, 1859 (print held by Special Collections, Templeman Library, University of Kent)[1]
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