123: Magic Lantern Art with Terry Borton

The Gilded Age and Progressive Era Podcast is back! After our summer hiatus, we're kicking off a new season and returning to our regular every-other-week release schedule. Thanks for your patience over the break — we've got a great slate of guests lined up, starting with this one.

Long before Hollywood, there was a hand-painted glass slide, a smoky projection lamp, and a darkened lodge hall. For the better part of a century, the magic lantern — not the movie camera — was America's dominant screen medium, and no one worked it harder or better than Joseph Boggs Beale, a Philadelphia commercial artist who produced over 2,600 lantern slide images between 1881 and 1917.

This week we're joined by Terry Borton, magic lantern historian, collector, and for twenty-five years the touring performer behind The American Magic Lantern Theater, whose new book Magic Lantern Art: The American Screen's First Great Narrative Artist, Joseph Boggs Beale (John Libbey Publishing) makes the case that Beale worked out the visual grammar of cinematic storytelling a generation before film existed. We talk about Beale's career, the business that mass-produced his images, and the surprisingly wide range of Americans — women lecturers, Black entrepreneurs, Native performers, temperance reformers, and Jacob Riis himself — who picked up the lantern to tell their own stories on their own terms.

Links & Further Viewing

Terry shared a few things he thought listeners would enjoy alongside the episode:

A recreated Jacob Riis lantern lecture. Some years ago, Terry created a condensed recreation of one of Riis's own traveling lantern lectures for the exhibition Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York's Other Half at the Museum of the City of New York and the Library of Congress. The exhibition — and this recreation — will be reprised this fall/winter at the New Museum in New York City. Watch here

Dr. Toer's Amazing Magic Lantern Show. A scholarly recreation of a traveling lantern show performed for audiences of recently freed African Americans in the Reconstruction-era South, built around the real touring program of J. W. Toer, a Baptist minister and former slave. Produced as part of the Who Built America? documentary series by the American Social History Project at CUNY. Watch here

The Museum of American Magic Lantern Shows. Terry's own virtual museum, tracing how lantern shows shaped American culture from the 1850s through the 1930s — women performers, Black performers, religious and reform lantern shows, war coverage, and more. (A few pages are still being fixed, but most of the site is up and running.) Visit the museum.

Boyd Cothran -- cothran@yorku.ca

Cathleen Cahil -- czc335@psu.edu

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