Troupers Of The Gold Coast

Originally published in 1928, Troupers of the Gold Coast follows the startup and success of a theater company of the same name that started performing in 1837 at California’s First Theater. More than 2,000 actors and actresses performed and trained with the company between 1848 and 2005. Until their last show in 2005, they were the oldest continually performing theater company in the world. By the time the Troupers found their footing, though, a little girl named Charlotte (Lotta) Crabtree was achieving an early stardom. Since the age of six, she had been performing along the coast for men and women of the Gold Rush. Her mother managed her career, thus ensuring that Lotta was never taken advantage of. She was extremely popular and very successful in acting, singing, dancing, and banjo playing. Lotta, who was named “The Nation’s Darling,” was able to tour the United States and Europe before retiring in her forties. Troupers of the Gold Coast captures the rise of one America’s most beloved entertainers, as well as the formation and excitement surrounding one of the most popular and successful American theater troupes of all time. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Bonded Leather binding

"This study of the daily work lives of five members of the Marsh Troupe, a nineteenth-century professional acting company composed primarily of children, sheds light on the construction of idealized childhood inside and outside the American theatre"--

Includes Part 1, Number 1 & 2: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals (January - December)

Performing Menken uses the life experiences of controversial actress and poet Adah Isaacs Menken to examine the culture of the Civil War period and what Menken's choices reveal about her period. It explores the roots of the cult of celebrity that emerged from crucible of war. While discussing Menken's racial and ethnic claims and her performance of gender and sexuality, Performing Menken focuses on contemporary use of social categories to explain patterns in America's past and considers why such categories appear to remain important.

This classic account of Old West mining camps and gold-hunting prospectors is “a successful digging of a rich historical vein . . . phenomenal” (The New York Times). This colorful blend of history, reference, and travelogue brings to life the frenzied search for precious metals in nineteenth-century America through a tour of mining camps and former boomtowns, many now abandoned. It reveals the unbelievable privations men endured in the high Sierra and the Rockies and in crossing the desert wastes of Arizona, Utah and Nevada; the mines first discovered in New Mexico by Coronado and his men four centuries ago; and the first great rush that hit California in 1849. She follows the miners who poured in successive waves into the golden gulches of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, climbed to the deeper mines high in the mountains of Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, and dared at last to penetrate the hostile Black Hills of South Dakota. In personally following the trails of the pioneering prospectors, Wolle stumbles upon mute evidence of past bloodshed, lust, and struggle, and recreates the excitement of the period. A gifted artist, she also includes maps and “more than a hundred poignant sketches conveying the loneliness, melancholy and crumbling dryness of ghost cities which throbbed once with the hopes of many people” (The New York Times). “The fascinating and definitive book on the ghost and near-ghost towns of the Old West.” —Lucius Beebe, The Territorial Enterprise “Good popular history and [a] useful reference work.” —Library Journal