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"P. T. Barnum"
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Who was P.T. Barnum?
\"After moving from Connecticut to New York City in 1834, twenty-four-year-old Phineas Taylor Barnum launched his now-legendary career as a showman. Even though spectators debated whether his exhibitions were authentic wonders, hoaxes, or a little bit of both, they were always astounded by what they saw. And readers are sure to be amazed by the story of how Barnum went from owning a museum filled with rare and unusual items to transforming the American circus into a popular and thrilling phenomenon.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Barnum : an American life
\"The first major biography of P.T. Barnum in a generation, [an] ... account of the forefather of American entertainment\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Showman and the Slave
Reiss uses P. T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the contours of race relations in the antebellum North. Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Heth was an elderly enslaved woman said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. Seizing upon the novelty, the newly emerging commercial press turned her act--and especially her death--into one of the first media spectacles in American history.
eBook
Tom Thumb’s Best Man: The Curious Case of Commodore Nutt
This essay explores the brief history of Commodore Nutt, a famous-then-forgotten dwarf whom P. T. Barnum exhibited at his American Museum in Civil War–era New York. If newspaper puffery was to be believed, Nutt was nothing short of a minor phenomenon as Barnum began plugging him into various skits and tours. One of Nutt’s most sellable attributes was his ostensible physical resemblance to Tom Thumb, a massively popular attraction at Barnum’s Museum the previous generation. Both Nutt and Thumb were ateliotic dwarves, with proportional physical features that observers often fetishized. But by the 1860s, Thumb had aged out of his exhibitory appeal and moved to endeavors beyond Barnum’s Museum. In the most obvious sense, Nutt’s presence allowed audiences a younger, fresh-faced version of Thumb. Yet the growing obsession with Nutt’s looks—and the claims that he was in fact Thumb himself , just with a different name—promised something else. As the ravages of war were tearing the nation (and bodies) apart, Nutt’s seeming reincarnation of Thumb offered audiences the idea that agelessness and immortality were genuinely possible.
Journal Article
Revisiting P. T. Barnum’s American Museum
P. T. Barnum’s American Museum opened its doors in 1841. By 1865, it had expanded to six floors of attractions that included human curiosities, waxworks, aquaria, automatons, portraits, theatrical productions, live animals, weapons, taxidermy, and countless other novelties. By its final year, forty-one million patrons had visited the American Museum: nearly six million more than the total population of the United States at the conclusion of the Civil War. This forum explores the various ways in which audiences perceived and misperceived the attractions they encountered at the museum. By analyzing instances in which official narratives crack, dissolve, or bend, the essays foreground the elasticity and variability of interpretation to examine what these encounters reveal about the societal tensions and collective fantasies animating the museum’s exhibits. Centering the interpretive process, this forum considers what we can and cannot know about the American Museum and its enduring cultural impact.
Journal Article
On Seeing and Not Seeing P. T. Barnum’s Beluga Whales
By the time P. T. Barnum unveiled his live beluga whale exhibit at the American Museum in 1861, whales had long been a pervasive, though largely invisible, presence in American life through the countless goods produced from their bodies. As animals, however, whales had grown increasingly exotic. Decades of unrestrained slaughter had engendered a stark decline in local whale populations. Barnum capitalized on this exoticism, circulating advertisements that promised museumgoers a sensational encounter with a live whale, but such encounters often proved elusive. Despite Barnum’s efforts to heighten the visibility of his whales, the animals themselves were upstaged by the technological innovations that enabled their capture, transport, and exhibition. Building on the work of Antoine Traisnel, this article examines the various levels of mediation shaping (mis)perceptions of Barnum’s beluga whales to explore the condition whales had come to occupy in capitalist modernity.
Journal Article
Life, Death, Evolution, and Blackness at Barnum’s American Museum
Focused on the “What Is It?” exhibit displayed in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, this article draws on scholarship from performance studies, Black studies, and the histories of medicine and science to theorize what we miss when we focus primarily on mainstream white audience reactions to historical performances. By contextualizing the exhibit via discussions of early evolutionary theories, taxidermy, and natural history, as well as avenues of agency such as trickster figures and performance/audience response, it argues that the actor’s performance both embodied and refuted racist scientific beliefs prevalent in the mid-nineteenth century. Barnum’s What Is It? exhibit forced visitors to not only ask themselves whether the exhibit was real, but to think upon the futures offered to nineteenth-century America in a land where organisms, beliefs, and ideas that should have been long dead persisted and remained ready to accompany the nation in whatever direction it chose to move forward.
Journal Article