Blackface used music and comedy as a delivery system for racist tropes and became the most popular form of entertainment in the Victorian era. Actor David Harewood explores the origins of Blackface minstrelsy, where white performers grotesquely darkened their skin, in early 19th-century America. How did it shape ideas of blackness in popular culture and why did it endure for so long?
Up Next in Recent Additions to History Hit
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You Can't Take It with You
Historian David Olusoga uncovers fresh insights into the unique lives of six icons, revealing the intimate secrets hidden in the legal artefacts left after their deaths. The wills of Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens and Beatrix Potter are reevaluated; their successes, failures and relationsh...
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Suffragettes with Lucy Worsley
Lucy Worsley presents this documentary, which uses dramatised testimony to tell the story of a group of working-class women conducting a dangerous campaign for the vote.
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I Was There: The Great War Interviews
In the early 1960s, 280 eyewitnesses of the First World War were interviewed for the series, The Great War. Using never-before-seen footage from these interviews, this film illuminates the poignant human experience of the war, through the eyes of those who survived it.
