THE JUBA PROJECT
Featured Performers and Documents
Parsing the Documents

'To parse' means to examine something in minute detail, to dismantle it in order to analyze its parts, and to try to understand how those parts relate to one another.  Historians spend a good deal of time engaged in this activity.  This part of the website provides some examples of what might--just might--be learned about blackface minstrelsy from the very close examination of a few documents.  Typically, the examination complicates, rather than simplifies any possible understanding.  The documents we examine in this section provide the case in point. 

The focus remains on the Ethiopian Serenaders, and on the dancer Juba, though other documents will be brought into the discussion.  You can link on the left to three different kinds of examination.

In HYPERDOCUMENTS we reproduce specific individual documents, and allow you to interact directly with them, linking on different parts of the image or words of the text to find additional explanation, discussion, information, and images, links, and sounds that might help to understand that one small part of a larger body of evidence. 

In PAST THE DOCUMENTS, TO THE DANCE we reproduce two publications by the Juba Project's director, Stephen Johnson, that discuss the attempts to move past the descriptions, to experience the 'brute event' of Juba dancing.  These documents provide an analysis of the eyewitness accounts of Juba's dance you will find in WITNESS TO JUBA and in the Hyperdocuments 'Juba Dancing' and 'Yankee Mason'.