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American historian From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marian Hannah Winter (March 20, 1910 – December 15, 1981) was an American musicologist and dance historian. She has been called one of "the [two] foremost names in American dance history."[1]
Winter was born in New York City, the daughter of Ernest Winter and Rose Rosenbluth Winter. Her father and maternal grandparents were all immigrants from central Europe; her mother was a policewoman[2] who collected theatrical sketches.[3]
She attended Radcliffe College.[4][5]
In 1939, Winter worked for the Federal Music Project in New York City, and assembled an exhibit on "Art Scores for Music" at the Brooklyn Museum,[6] called "the first international exhibition of scores for cabaret and concert hall music".[7]
In the 1940s, dance historian Lincoln Kirstein solicited Winter to write for Dance Index, a magazine he headed. In contrast to Kirstein's analytical or polemical approach to history, Winter was more of an archivist.[1] One of Winter's most influential works is "Juba and American Minstrelsy", published in 1947.[8] The article sketches the life of Master Juba, a black American dancer active in the mid-19th century. Winter argues that Juba introduced African elements to American dance forms and, in the process, created a new, distinctly American style. The article thus attempts to "[re-appropriate] for black culture what is otherwise generally seen as racist theft."[9]
Winter moved to France in her later years, where she worked as a translator and collected art and ephemera related to fairs and festivals.[3] There, she published The Theater of the Marvels in both English- and French-language editions.[10][11] She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974.[12] Of her 1974 book, The Pre-Romantic Ballet, one reviewer said that "Some historians have an ability to write about the remote past as if they were giving a first-hand account of personal experience. Marian Hannah Winter is one of them."[13]
Winter used a wheelchair in her later years, to manage the effects of a progressive neurological condition.[3] She died in Paris.[1] There is a collection of her papers, including correspondence, notebooks, and photographs, at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.[19] The Marian Hannah Winter Professorship in Theatre and Dance Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was named in her memory. In 1985, items from her collection of fairground memorabilia were displayed at the Pusey Library in Cambridge.[3]
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