Early 1800s Music and Competitive Dance Extravaganza!
Schedule
Wed Dec 10 2025 at 06:30 pm to 08:00 pm
UTC-05:00Location
Middle Collegiate Church | New York, NY
Scholars and performers will celebrate a new book about Black and Irish challenge dancers in early 19th-century NYC.About this Event
Stony Brook University professor April Masten, author of the new (U. of Illinois Press), and other experts will discuss the lives of two antebellum dancers and perform works related to their careers: Irish American John Diamond (ca. 1823-1857), and African American William Henry Lane (1825-ca. 1852), known as Juba. Diamond and Juba became internationally famous as competitors in the art and sport of challenge dancing, which was born from Black-Irish social interaction in antebellum New York’s dockside markets, taverns, and theaters. Promoted as a masculine art with ties to boxing, it featured prolific gambling, hefty purses, and championship belts, yet also included women competitors, cross-dressing, and blackface. Its practitioners’ astonishing jigs drew huge audiences across northeastern port cities, along Mississippi Valley circus routes, and into England’s provincial music halls. Masten’s study of Diamond and Juba’s rivalry and parallel careers offers a rare glimpse into Black and immigrant strivings in an expanding nation keen for talent yet divided by prejudice.
The evening’s scholars and performers, in addition to April Masten, will include cultural historian John Reddick; dancer, actor and scholar DeWitt Fleming Jr. performing Black-Irish tap dance; instrumentalist and singer Hubby Jenkins playing old-time banjo; and vocalist, musician and writer Christina Britton Conroy.
Masten’s book will be available for sale and signing at the event, which will be followed by a reception with refreshments.
Credits:
Cover design by Jason R. Gabbert
“Bravo Dick!_welt the flure!!_foot about!!!” From “The Hedge School,” Designed & Etched by W. H. Brooke, A.R.H.A., Dublin, Published by Wm. Curry Jun.r & Co. Marsh, 1830.
Excerpt from Georgia Champions playbill, Portland, Maine, June 18 [1845]. Box 7, Folder-Juba, Mins., Box 7 (H-K), Playbills-Companies, Minstrels, Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Detail from Royal Vauxhall Gardens Poster, 1848. Harvard Theatre Collection.
William Sydney Mount, Dance of the Haymakers, 1845. Long Island Museum of American Art, History & Carriages.
Where is it happening?
Middle Collegiate Church, 50 East 7th Street, New York, United StatesUSD 12.51 to USD 17.85
