There are three main paths at the beginning of this overview: Animation, Minstrelsy, and Vaudeville. Each of these paths offers an historical overview and illustrates that history with documents, films, and audio recordings. The Animation path talks about the beginnings of American commercial animation in the early twentieth century. The Vaudeville path gives a snapshot of the types of shows that were common then, and discusses how animation became part of those shows. The Minstrelsy path looks at blackface minstrelsy,  an incredibly popular performance form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines how minstrelsy found its way onto the vaudeville stage, and how it found a home in the new medium of animation. It also offers examples of recent twentieth and twenty-first century minstrelsy.

This is a story with lots of intersecting narratives, so these paths all meet up and diverge at different points. Feel free to follow one to the next, or to jump between them. Either way, this the beginning of an explanation about how popular cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse or Felix the Cat are actually blackface minstrels, and how we somehow came to forget that's what they are....

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