American Society for Theatre Research Barnard Hewitt Award, 2013
“A superb study of a significant facet of American melodrama…. Immaculately researched, fluent, lucid, and unpretentious, Hughes’s intense concentration on specific scenes, with emphasis on their cultural content and contexts, imparts a method of study which reaches well beyond this book to guide other scholarly enquiries… a mature cultural history, essential far beyond the theatre scholar’s bookshelf.”
—David Mayer, Theatre Survey