When Princeton historian Rhae Lynn Barnes began researching blackface in America in 2013, a librarian at the Library of Congress told her she had personally hidden some of the primary source materials years earlier — because she feared the Ku Klux Klan would use them.
Two decades of archival work later, Barnes brings her resulting book, “Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment,” to Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena for a discussion and signing. She will be joined by David M. Henkin, a UC Berkeley historian presenting his own new book, “Out of the Ballpark: How to Think about Baseball.”
The event is scheduled for 7:00 p.m. at Vroman’s, 695 E. Colorado Blvd. The listing on Pasadena Now gives the date as Thursday, April 23, while the Vroman’s Bookstore website listed the event on Friday, April 24. Readers should confirm the date with Vroman’s at (626) 449-5320 or at vromansbookstore.com. The event is free with an RSVP available on the bookstore’s website.
For Barnes, the Pasadena appearance marks a return to the region where she grew up. A fourth-generation native of Anaheim, Santa Ana, and Los Angeles, she has described growing up blocks from Disneyland and recognizing early traces of minstrelsy in the park’s soundtrack and animated films, according to her Princeton University faculty profile and a recent interview published by Cultured Magazine.
“Darkology,” published March 24 by Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton, is the product of approximately 20 years of research into the nearly 10,000 published minstrel show plays that formed the foundation of amateur blackface entertainment in the United States, according to the publisher. The book runs 576 pages.
Barnes argues that blackface was not a marginal or short-lived phenomenon in American life. Her research documents the presence of minstrel performances in fraternal organizations such as the Elks, in churches, public schools, universities, on military bases, and in Japanese American internment camps during World War II, where it was used as a tool of what the publisher’s description terms “Americanization.”
The book also traces how blackface entertainment intersected with the American presidency. Barnes found that presidents from Woodrow Wilson through Gerald Ford had connections to minstrel entertainment. Franklin D. Roosevelt had a children’s minstrel show he helped script scheduled for performance at his Warm Springs, Georgia, estate on the day he died, April 12, 1945, as reported in the Boston Globe’s review of the book.
Barnes is an assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, according to her Princeton faculty page. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard and her B.A. from UC Berkeley. She previously served as senior advisor and on-screen talent for the PBS documentary series “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War” with Henry Louis Gates Jr., according to her academic biography.
“Darkology” has drawn national critical attention since its publication. Dwight Garner, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called it a major work of American history. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Blight described it as a masterpiece, and Annette Gordon-Reed, also a Pulitzer winner, called it a necessary exploration of a disturbing aspect of American history, according to the publisher’s materials. The book earned a Kirkus Star and a starred review from Library Journal, which called it a landmark work of history. The New York Times, TIME, and Kirkus Reviews each named it among the best books of the month at publication, according to the publisher. Barnes discussed the book on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross in March 2026.
During that NPR interview, Barnes described how amateur minstrel shows became so widespread in the 19th century that performers published step-by-step guides for staging them. During the Great Depression, she said, Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration distributed lists of recommended minstrel plays to schools, charities, and colleges, according to NPR’s published account of the interview.
Barnes also credited the civil rights era — and particularly Black and white mothers — with helping eliminate blackface from public school curricula by the 1970s, according to her NPR interview.
Henkin, a professor of history at UC Berkeley who has taught courses on American society and culture for nearly three decades, will discuss “Out of the Ballpark: How to Think about Baseball,” published by Oxford University Press in March 2026. The 152-page book reexamines baseball as a cultural phenomenon, tracing its connections to imperial expansion, racial politics, labor relations, and mass media, according to the Oxford University Press description. Barnes provided a jacket endorsement for Henkin’s book, according to the Bookshop.org listing.
Vroman’s Bookstore, founded in 1894 by Adam Clark Vroman, is Southern California’s oldest and largest independent bookstore, according to the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce. The store hosts hundreds of events annually and was named Bookseller of the Year in 2008 by Publishers Weekly. In a historical parallel to one of the themes of Barnes’s book, the bookstore donated books to Japanese American internees in the Los Angeles area during World War II, according to the store’s historical accounts published on the Visit Pasadena website.
RHAE LYNN BARNES & DAVID M. HENKIN DISCUSS & SIGN, DARKOLOGY Date & Time: Thursday, April 23, 2026 at 7:00 p.m. | Venue: Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91101 | Phone Number: (626) 449-5320 | Website: https://vromansbookstore.com/event/2026-04-23/rhae-lynn-barnes-david-m-henkin-discuss-sign-darkology-blackface-and-american-way
