Abstract: This dissertation examines how Shirley Temple's star persona was shaped, in part, by performance traditions that developed on the stage during the nineteenth century. These traditions reflect a very specific understanding of childhood, one that defines the child's innocence as inviolable. However, in the early 1930s, as Shirley Temple emerged as Hollywood's most popular star, audiences began to perceive something potentially dangerous in spectacles of girlhood. New understandings of masculinity, sexuality, and the public sphere all contributed to the redefinition of childhood innocence as not inviolable but imperiled. Each chapter of the dissertation focuses on an aspect of Temple's stardom that strikes contemporary audiences as perverse or strange and demonstrates that these seemingly anomalous features of her career actually represent traces of theatrical traditions that once flourished on the nineteenth-century stage. Chapter one explores the history of young girls' impersonations of sexualized women; chapter two examines the pairing of black men with white girls in the tradition of the Tom show; chapter three considers adult men's pleasure in images of little girls; and chapter four looks at women's impersonations of young girls. By identifying Shirley Temple as a transitional figure, one whose star persona developed out of well established performance traditions, and by recognizing how she has functioned as a touchstone for emerging concerns about childhood, this project uncovers a subtle but important shift in the definition of childhood. The dissertation begins the project of understanding how the twinned figures of the pedophile and the imperiled child entered into the popular imagination in the early twentieth century.