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Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s. By Sherrie Tucker. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. x, 413 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-82232485-7.)
In recent years, entertainment history has gained legitimacy as part of the historical narrative-as well it should. Show business history often suffered from the same biases that drove most historical studies. Just as minorities were ignored in general histories, so too were they absent from surveys of sports and movies; women, similarly, were rarely center stage in reviews of most historical events or in treatments of popular cultural fare. The stereotypical images assigned to women singers, movie stars, and television personalities were rarely questioned or analyzed. Indeed, if women were absent from any category of entertainment, few raised the question: why was that? Sherrie Tucker's Swing Shift addresses this very...