ABSTRACT
The pageant’s form borrowed from the tableau vivant genre, as well as from the long-standing processional pageants that preceded and overlapped with them. Regardless of what history was being portrayed or where it was being portrayed—the many weeks of rehearsals leading up to a pageant encouraged face-to-face contact between community participants who might otherwise never have encountered each other. Pageant participants intentionally drew on a broad cross-section of a community, with the thought that the communal histories that unfolded within the pageant would promote the cross-class unity mirrored in the pageant’s cross-class production effort. Most pageant writers assembled their historic episodes with an eye toward inspiring patriotic sentiment, fostering joyful civic participation, and also avoiding controversy. American pageants at this time similarly reckoned with the recent war, but unlike their British counterparts, focused a good deal on how citizens on the home front supported the war from afar.
