, published this month by Coach House Books. Thompson, a Ryerson University assistant professor in the School of Creative Industries, specializes in 19th century Black history and visual culture. In Uncle , she traces the social, cultural and political tendrils of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin , exploring how the figure of Tom morphs from a heroic enslaved man into a trope, an insult and the inspiration for generations of theatrical interpretations, films, radio and TV characters, and even consumer products. Follow Thompson on twitter at @DrCherylT. Vaudeville was not the only major institution using nostalgia to shape popular notions of race and gender in the late nineteenth century. At the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, American audiences became increasingly obsessed with nostalgia for the antebellum South. Human displays as entertainment enticed late-nineteenth-century white middle-class audiences and continued until the mid-1960s. These ‘world’s fairs,’ ‘expositions,’ and ‘exhibitions’ – interchangeable terms – were celebrations of cultural, industrial, scientific, and imperial achievements to promote national pride and economic growth.