Blackface studies has been booming as an academic field since Eric Lott's groundbreaking analysis Love & Theft appeared in 1993, and Brian Roberts's recent book Blackface Nation: Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812–1925 is a welcome contribution to this conversation. Roberts analyzes nineteenth-century American popular song while mapping out the dynamic, contentious relationship between the ideologies of moral uplift among the emerging middle class and the rebellious, masculine, pleasure-seeking working-class culture. Roberts begins his book by tracing the recent phenomenon of blackface “incidents” on campus Halloween and fraternity parties. Most of the rest of the book focusses on nineteenth-century US culture, and explores blackface minstrelsy, reform (especially abolitionism), and moral uplift, as well as communalism, patriotism, competing class ideologies, and notions of an authentic self. In the past, histories of nineteenth-century America have sometimes oversimplified the relationship between abolitionism and blackface minstrelsy as completely antagonistic in their representations of African Americans. Roberts complicates this dichotomy somewhat by noting the gentrification of theaters and minstrel shows during the mid-nineteenth century as well as the impact of blackface depictions of African Americans on white American abolitionists. He also examines American popular music, minstrel shows, and abolitionism against the socioeconomic shift from the “artisan republicanism” (78) of the early nineteenth century, which was characterized by virtue, self-improvement, civic responsibility, and pride in one's craft, to the “market revolution” of the mid-nineteenth century that encouraged consumption and pleasure. While this shift may in hindsight seem to favor minstrelsy's celebration of hedonistic consumption at the expense of middle-class northern reformers like the Hutchinson Family Singers (to whom Roberts gives extensive attention), Roberts reminds us that the abolitionist messages of this group were more popular than we often assume. The author also ties his analysis of popular song to communalism, an idea that was prominent not only in group performances of popular songs but also in the nineteenth-century northern middle-class culture of reform, a culture linked to utopian communities such as Brook Farm.

Regarding minstrel shows, Roberts borrows from the first word of Lott's title to reverse the phrase “hate crime” in analyzing what he terms “love-crime” racism (20). According to Roberts, white Americans feel affection toward African Americans who conform to white notions of an “authentic” blackness that is physical, hypersexual, and anti-intellectual, but the dark underside of this “love” is violence “directed against African Americans who refused to stay low” (21). This impulse, which was prominent in white performances of blackface from the 1830s to the early twenty-first century, was motivated by rebellion against a white middle-class identity defined as respectability and blandness as well as by hostility toward black uplift. African American leaders who tried to earn respect through education, hard work, frugality, and restraint did not fit these white expectations and therefore were threatened, beaten, and sometimes killed by white mobs and were routinely mocked in minstrel shows and songs such as “Zip Coon.”

Roberts excels in helping readers imagine specific times and places, such as the milieu of printer Nathaniel Coverly Jr. in early nineteenth-century Boston. Roberts also makes good use of his illustrations, particularly his reading of a photograph of the Hutchinson brothers that points out the mixture of the old agrarian New England identity, the rising entrepreneurial class, and the sensitivity of the professional artist.

The catholicity of Roberts's approach is laudable, and it helps readers understand the complex relationships among abolitionism, minstrelsy, popular song, and class in nineteenth-century America. One challenge with casting such a wide net, however, is maintaining continuity throughout the book, and readers may feel that some individual chapters are overly compartmentalized. For example, in writing about the abolitionist songs of the Hutchinson Family Singers, it might have aided readers to mention whether they were exposed to blackface representations while growing up in Milford, New Hampshire or while on tour. In addition, while Roberts wisely favors depth over breadth in most chapters, such as his explication of Coverly's broadsides and ballads or the background and careers of the Hutchinson Family Singers, the last twenty pages or so (focussing on African American musical performers after the Civil War and during the Harlem Renaissance) seem rather rushed and thin. Nevertheless, the book is highly readable, well researched and well documented, and insightful. The book would be of interest to specialists in American studies, popular music, blackface minstrelsy, and abolitionism, as well as to a more general academic audience.