Photograph

There is some uncertainty about how California-born Florence Andrews (1887-1991) became Florence O'Denishawn, but most attribute her name change to a misprint of "Florence of Denishawn," the renowned dance school. The name stuck even as O'Denishawn moved on to shows like the Ziegfeld Follies, and wherever she appeared,...

This photograph captures the chill and excitement surrounding the winter holidays at Kansas City's Union Station. Here, Kansas City Southern's Holiday Express Train chugs across a snowy rail beneath a neon "Union Station" sign. The train was built from retired railcars in 2001 and transformed into a brightly lit and br...

In this portrait, Louise stands in a dramatic theatrical pose. Garbed in a strapless white dress gathered at her waist and again at the hips, Riley gazes up to her left as if in thought. Flowers secured to her bodice and hair act as harbingers of tender gentility. She delicately holds a piece of white fabric aloft behi...

Like Ruth St. Denis, Bothwell Browne, and many other performers of the era, dancer and songwriter Bobbie Tremaine used exotic costumes and dances associated with foreign cultures to heighten her appeal to American audiences. In 1921, Tremaine wrote a serialized story entitled "Confessions of a Dancer," a greatly romant...

Though cross-dressing vaudevillians were fairly common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, dancer Bothwell Browne (1877-1947) broke from a tradition of broadly humorous bawdy or vulgar impersonations in favor of work that explored a more nuanced view of gender. Famous for playing characters such as Cleopatra, Br...

Kansas City-born author and photographer Bruce Mathews tends to write about and photograph the city in its best light. Here, the sun has just set on Union Station and the warm hues of the sky and street lights complement the Station alit in purple. Mathews has written several books about Kansas City, including the most...

When a punctured eardrum ended Japanese born Sessue Hayakawa's original dream of a naval career, he enrolled at the University of Chicago to study banking. During a 1914 trip to Los Angeles, Hayakawa was lured into acting and went on to become one of the great film idols of the early motion picture era, rivaling Dougla...

This photograph features a woman in an elegant gown and an ornate headpiece. Her necklaces drape over her chest in a way that mirrors the parabolic shape of her headpiece, emphasizing her face against the dark background. Hixon often manipulated his photographs as they were developing, which he appears to have done to...

Usually, rube comics were favored by rural audiences who liked their entertainers down to earth. In Chic’s case, you couldn’t get more down to earth than the outhouses that figured in his storytelling. Despite a preference for sophisticated monologists, Broadway audiences took to two of the cracker barrel types, includ...

Born in New York in 1893, Hazel Flint later became a silent film actress of the 1920s, starring in films like Modern Daughters (1927) and The Bootleggers (1922). Not much is known about her role in these films or the films themselves, likely because they are considered "lost films" meaning they are believed to no longe...