Angelina Jolie "blackfaced" as Mariane Pearl

Black-face began in the Bowery I read, where the theater district once was, beginning quite large in the 1820s. A little later the first successful American opera "A Sawmill River or a Yankee Trick" was said to have been done in "black face". It was written by the "Pied Piper of Catherine Slip" Micah Hawkins, a relation of American genre painter, William Sydney Mount, famous for some of the first portrayals of African-Americans in the arts (see Frankenstein's excellent book). Unfortunately he died of a fever when he was only 44, playing his piano under the counter for his customers in the store. For "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" now in paperback by Bernard-Henri Levy, Melville House books in its website "Moby Lives".