Storms! Shipwrecks! Massacres!

This essay focuses on an underrepresented medium of nineteenth-century visual culture—the theatrical playbill—and its relationship to antebellum riot spectatorship. Specifically, it contends that antebellum theater producers used sensational playbills in order to cultivate a profitable nativist audience. Philadelphia serves as a central case study, because the city witnessed a series of nativist and anti-immigrant riots during the era, including the infamous Kensington and Southwark riots of 1844. As pamphlets and lithographs of these riots soon appeared, theater producers posted eye-catching playbills and mounted theatrical melodramas capitalizing on the spectacular street violence. Because the playbill is ephemeral in nature and many of these noncanonical dramas were soon forgotten, scholars often have overlooked popular theater artifacts. Yet through scrutiny of extant theatrical materials now, we can better understand the era’s class-based conflicts, specifically how the visual culture of theater contributed to them.