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Duncan evokes Marlene Dietrich as the guiding spirit - the blue angel, if you will - hovering over the trends he is chronicling: transgression, cultural critique, experimental sexuality, and strong nocturnal communion.
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Duncan’s ambitious and wide-ranging work makes a terrific new contribution toward defining the paramount significance of radical and intimate performance venues of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.Īrriving at such a definition requires careful examination of the numerous nightlife and performance genres which went in and out of fashion in those decades. Historians have explored chapters in New York City’s interregnum - David Stowe, for example, covers Cafe Society in the late 1930s, Patrick Burke describes the jazz clubs on 52nd Street, and James Gavin chronicles European-style cabaret - but a comprehensive history, with more of a national perspective, has been lacking. We long have recognized that between the storied nightclub era of Prohibition days and the age of rock ’n’ roll, there was a perceptible but elusive set of nightlife entertainment venues that kept radical left-wing political values percolating during the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Duncan’s new book admirably fills a void in the historiography of 20th century American culture.