Originating around 1830 and peaking in popularity twenty years later, the minstrel show offered blackface comedy for the common man. The minstrel show, prominent primarily in Northeastern urban centers, had a profound impact on nineteenth-century Americans, including Mark Twain who remarked in his Autobiography that "if I could have the nigger show back again … I should have but little further use for opera." Although it declined by 1900, the minstrel show continued to shape American popular entertainment and remained a topic of intense historical and political debate. It is both reviled for its racism, including its exploitation of black culture, and celebrated as the "people's culture" and the first indigenous form of American popular culture.

Thomas D. Rice, an itinerant blackface performer, is responsible for one of the founding moments in the history of the minstrel show. In approximately 1830 Rice saw an elderly black man performing a strange...