"T'morra,' T'morra"': The 1940s Broadway Period Musical and Progressive Nostalgia in Bloomer Girl

Abstract

Billed as a "Modern Musical Comedy with Old-Fashioned Charm," the Civil War-set Bloomer Girl (1944) followed Oklahoma! as part of a World War ll-era cycle of Broadway musicals steeped in period Americana. This article argues that Bloomer Girl - connecting First-wave feminism to Rosie the Riveter, and the abolitionist movement with civil rights - offered a complex vision of progressive nostalgia, advancing utopian aims of social justice that anticipate Finian's Rainbow.