Description: "Tomko (Univ. of California, Riverside) blazes a new trail in dance scholarship byinterconnecting US history and dance studies. Using analyses of class, gender, and ethnicity, shefocuses on dance as a vehicle for cultural intervention in Progressive-era America, asmanifested in immigration, physical culture movement, and the settlement projects. Others haveconcentrated on the art dancer as precursor to US modern dance, but Tomko is the first to arguesuccessfully that middle-class US women promoted a new dance practice to manage industrialchanges, crowded urban living, massive immigration, and interchange and repositioning amongdifferent classes. They blended foreign and US cultural practices and negotiated gender issues ineducation, social work, dance hall reforms, dance innovations, and dance patronage. Tomko linkspost-WW I immigration laws, shifting gender roles, and Freudian theories to the motivation ofmodern dancers to reject the derived conventionalized 'foreign' materials of the Progressive era. Inso doing the author rewrites the history of 20th-century US dance, showing that theProgressive-era dance practices made significant cultural interventions in past US history andsuggest relevant questions for the future. Annotated endnotes, bibliography, collections consulted,and index enhance the value of this rich book. All academic and general collection" -C. T.Bond, Goucher College, Choice, November 2000

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