Carol E. Harrison and Thomas J. Brown's "Zouave Theaters" charts the rise and fall of the nineteenth century's most important military fashion fad. Zouave uniforms originated in the French conquest of Algeria as an imaginative appropriation of North African martial culture. French participation in the Crimean War made a sensation of the collarless jacket, knee-length baggy pants, sash, and turban, and the look spread worldwide from the mid-1850s to 1870. Theater was crucial to this popularity, for the outfit was not merely a uniform but a costume. To be a Zouave was to play a role, which is how Harrison and Brown center their book, analyzing the interactions between the stage and the military that anticipated the twentieth-century influence of war movies. The picturesque ensemble also fascinated visual artists, including specialists in the battle genre as well as more innovative painters such as Winslow Homer and Vincent Van Gogh and pioneers in magazine illustration and photography. Combining analysis of material culture, performance, and artistic and literary renditions, "Zouave Theaters" recovers an iconic figure of the mid-nineteenth century. The chronological and geographical trajectory of the narrative highlights Zouave flexibility as the type moved across different settings. The first chapter situates the origins of the uniform in postrevolutionary French ideas about empire and engages the scholarly debate over the nature of Orientalism. The second chapter examines how the Crimean War, French participation in the Italian Risorgimento, and the carnival regime of Napoleon III propelled Zouaves to international fame. Ethnic cross-dressing in North Africa provided a foundation for gender cross-dressing in Crimean battlefront theaters and on stages in Paris and London. Those dynamics remain central in the third chapter, which traces the transplantation of the Zouave phenomenon to the United States, where soldiers and entertainers combined to forge a style of precision drill later associated with football halftime shows. The fourth chapter addresses the approximately thirty thousand Zouaves who served in the Union and Confederate armies and explores spectacle drill as a disciplinary instrument as well as the opportunities that the figure of the Zouave offered to women and African Americans. The fifth chapter focuses on the multinational corps of devout Catholics who dressed in Zouave imitation of Muslim tribesmen to defend papal sovereignty in Rome. The Pontifical Zouaves added a new variation on the theme by associating heroism with holy martyrdom rather than cheeky humor and combat ferocity. The sixth chapter explains the decline of the Zouave, a result more of bureaucratic than technological modernity in the United States but in France, a manifestation of the profound upheaval of World War I. A brief epilogue explores the nostalgia of recent Zouave reincarnations in American re-enacting, Italian art, and French street politics. "Zouave Theaters" will engage several categories of readers. The transnational study of an influential model of soldiering will appeal to those interested in nineteenth-century military topics or the cultural history of war. The book devotes particular attention to the US Civil War, and readers focused on that period will find its story told in a fresh context and with an original interpretation. The transmission of a French colonial innovation to the metropole and then to the United States and the Papal States-and the British West Indies, Poland, Brazil, Hawai'i, Spain, and Quebec-contributes to recent scholarship on links between France and the world. From a thematic standpoint, the book also offers a valuable case study to historians of gender, fashion, performance, and the visual arts"--