If you are interested in entertainers and the history of entertainment, you may want to explore the following: "Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry." Berliner was a largely self-educated man who was responsible for the development of the microphone and the flat recording disc and gramophone player.
In "Inventing Entertainment: The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies," you can read about, as well as see and listen to, the work of the "Wizard of Menlo Park."
The Federal Theatre Project was one of five arts-related projects established during the first term of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt under the Works Progress Administration. In "The New Deal Stage: Selections from the Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939," you can learn about an important part of the career of Orson Welles, the mastermind behind "Citizen Kane." In this collection are stage and costume designs, still photographs, posters and scripts for Welles' productions of Macbeth, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus and Power, a topical drama of the period.
Around the same time, William P. Gottlieb began photographing the greatest names in jazz. More than 1,600 of these extraordinary images can be seen in "Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz." Other entertainers are documented in "Creative Americans: Portraits by Carl Van Vechten, 1932-1964."
And that is just a small portion of the entertainment-related images, sound recordings and films available in American Memory. If you go to the American Memory Collection Finder Search page and scroll down the list of more than 100 collections, entertainers of all sorts, from many periods in American history, can be found.
A. Al Hirschfeld, artist, Philip Bosco in Copenhagen Meets Claudia Shear in Dirty Blonde, 2000. Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction No.: LC-USZ62-127468.
B. Al Hirschfeld, artist, "Billy Graham: A Visionaries Vision," 1970. Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction No.: LC-USZ62-127465.