E-Books
While parts of our collection are not accessible from home, NYPL offers e-books through multiple sources. To access them, all that is required is a valid New York Public Library Card. We are currently offering digital library cards that can be obtained through this application and used to access e-books.
Many books can be found on NYPL’s Overdrive application that is available on a wide variety of e-readers, portable devices, PCs and Macs. The New York Public Library also has partnerships with publishers and online repositories like the Hathi Trust and Google Books.
Non-Fiction
Tap Dancing America by ISBN: 9780190225384Here is the vibrant, colorful, high-stepping story of tap -- the first comprehensive, fully documented history of a uniquely American art form, exploring all aspects of the intricate musical and social exchange that evolved from Afro-Irish percussive step dances like the jig, gioube, buck-and-wing, and juba to the work of such contemporary tap luminaries as Gregory Hines, Brenda Bufalino, Dianne Walker, and Savion Glover.
Jazz Dance by ISBN: 9780813049298The history of jazz dance is best understood by thinking of it as a tree. The roots of jazz dance are African. Its trunk is vernacular, shaped by European influence, and exemplified by the Charleston and the Lindy Hop. From the vernacular have grown many and varied branches, including tap, Broadway, funk, hip-hop, Afro-Caribbean, Latin, pop, club jazz, popping, B-boying, party dances, and more. Editors Lindsay Guarino and Wendy Oliver have assembled an array of seasoned practitioners and scholars who trace the numerous histories of jazz dance and examine various aspects of the field, including trends, influences, training, race, aesthetics, international appeal, and its relationship to tap, rock, indie, black concert dance, and Latin dance.
What the Eye Hears by ISBN: 9780374536510The first authoritative history of tap dancing, one of the great art forms--along with jazz and musical comedy--created in America, What the Eye Hears offers an authoritative account of the great American art of tap dancing. Brian Seibert, a dance critic forThe New York Times, begins by exploring tap's origins as a hybrid of the jig and clog dancing and dances brought from Africa by slaves. He tracks tap's transfer to the stage through blackface minstrelsy and charts its growth as a cousin to jazz in the vaudeville circuits. Seibert chronicles tap's spread to ubiquity on Broadway and in Hollywood, analyzes its decline after World War II, and celebrates its rediscovery and reinvention by new generations of American and international performers. In the process, we discover how the history of tap dancing is central to any meaningful account of American popular culture.
Five Points by ISBN: 9781439137741All but forgotten today, Five Points was once renowned the world over. Its handful of streets in lower Manhattan featured America's most wretched poverty, shared by Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, Chinese, and African Americans. It was the scene of more riots, scams, saloons, brothels, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in the new world. Yet it was also a font of creative energy, crammed full of cheap theaters and dance halls, prizefighters and machine politicians, and meeting halls for the political clubs that would come to dominate not just the city but an entire era in American politics. From Jacob Riis to Abraham Lincoln, Davy Crockett to Charles Dickens, Five Points both horrified and inspired everyone who saw it.
Everybody's Doin' It by ISBN: 9780393608953Everybody's Doin' It is the eye-opening story of popular music's seventy-year rise in the brothels, dance halls, and dives of New York City. It traces the birth of popular music, including ragtime and jazz, to convivial meeting places for sex, drink, music, and dance. Musicologist Dale Cockrell recreates this ephemeral underground world by mining tabloids, newspapers, court records of police busts, lurid exposés, journals, and the reports of undercover detectives working for social-reform organizations, who were sent in to gather evidence against such low-life places. Everybody's Doin' It illuminates the how, why, and where of America's popular music and its buoyant journey from the dangerous Five Points of downtown to the interracial black and tans of Harlem.
Fiction
Juba! by ISBN: 9780062112743In New York Times bestselling author Walter Dean Myers's last novel, he delivers a gripping story based on the life of a real dancer known as Master Juba, who lived in the nineteenth century. This engaging historical novel is based on the true story of the meteoric rise of an immensely talented young black dancer, William Henry Lane, who influenced today's tap, jazz, and step dancing. With meticulous and intensive research, Walter Dean Myers has brought to life Juba's story. The novel includes photographs, maps, and other images from Juba's time and an afterword from Walter Dean Myers's wife about the writing process of Juba!
Showtime at the Apollo by ISBN: 9781683353836Writer Ted Fox and artist James Otis Smith bring to life Harlem's legendary theater in this graphic novel adaptation of Fox's definitive, critically acclaimed history of the Apollo. Since its inception as an African-American theater in 1934, the Apollo, and the thousands of entertainers who performed there, have led the way in the presentation of swing, bebop, rhythm and blues, jazz, gospel, soul, funk and hip-hop--along with the latest in dance and comedy. The Apollo has nurtured and featured thousands of artists, many of whom have become legends. The beauty they have given the world--their art--transcends the hatred, ignorance, and intolerance that often made their lives difficult.
Chorus Lines, Caviar, and Corpses by ISBN: 9781617733604First in a delicious series: Five friends and dancers on a Russian river cruise discover it takes legwork to solve a murder. It's never too late to kick up your heels. Just ask Tina, Janice, Pat, Mary Louise, and Gini--a.k.a. the Happy Hoofers. After posting a video of their tap-dancing routine on the internet, the leggy ladies find themselves booked to perform on a lavish river cruise up the Volga from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
Don't Tap-Dance on Your Teacher by ISBN: 9780061148903Roscoe Riley doesn't mean to break the rules Don't Tap-Dance on Your Teacher Rat-tat-TAT Tap shoes make the best noise ever But tap dancing? The big boys say that's just for girls. Roscoe promised to tap in the school talent show. When the teasing starts, will he keep his word?
Knockin' on Wood by ISBN: 9781620140192An inspirational biography of Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates (1907-1998), an African American man who overcame the hardship of losing a leg at age 12 and went on to become a world-renowned tap dancer.
Digital Collections
In NYPL’s Digital Collections Portal the Jerome Robbins Dance Division houses a host materials that are accessible while onsite at the Library for the Performing Arts. When trying to access materials from home, many items are restricted, specifically Audio and Moving Image items, but there are still informative pieces available. To make it easier to identify them, items that are not available from home have a lock symbol over the bottom left of each thumbnail. It is not possible to search for just items available from home, so below you can see a short list of some great resources.
Interviews - Part of our Dance Oral History Project, these interviews were recorded with various Tap legends and are available in full anywhere in the world.
Photographs - There are many photographs and notable tap dancers housed in NYPL's Digital Collections. These items are shared across the Jerome Robbins Dance Division as well as the Billy Rose Theatre Division who hold numerous photographs of tap greats performing on Broadway. Some featured dancers include Gregory Hines, Eleanor Powell, Savion Glover, and The Nicholas Brothers.
Databases
- Oxford Reference Online
Oxford Reference Online brings together language and subject reference works from one of the world's biggest reference publishers into a single cross-searchable resource. Titles cover a wide range of humanities, social science, performing arts, and general reference subjects. Dance publications include the International Encyclopedia of Dance and the Oxford Dictionary of Dance. Theatre publications include The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance and The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. **Patrons should read the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy of this resource before searching.**
- International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance with Full Text
Contains all of the content available in International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance as well as full text for 100 titles, including Canadian Theatre Review, Dance Chronicle, Dance Teacher, Modern Drama, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Research in Dance Education, Research in Drama Education, Studies in Theatre and Performance, TDR: The Drama Review, Theater, and more. **Patrons should read the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy of this resource before searching.**
- Performing Arts Periodicals Database
Previously known as the International Index for the Performing Arts Full Text (IIPA), the Performing Arts Periodicals Database covers the subjects of dance, film, television, drama, recorded sound, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, broadcast arts, circus performance, comedy, storytelling, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic and more. Contains over 172,013 records providing current and retrospective coverage, with citations dating back to 1864. **Patrons should read the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy of this resource before searching.**
- Oxford Music Online
A gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. Contains the Grove Music Online, as well as The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Oxford Companion to Music. **Patrons should read the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy of this resource before searching.**
