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Winner of the 2000 American Studies Network Prize and the Literature and Language Award from the Association of American Publishers, Inc.Early American naturalists assembled dazzling collections of native flora and fauna, from John Bartram's botanical garden in Philadelphia and the artful display of animals in Charles Willson Peale's museum to P. T. Barnum's American Museum, infamously characterized by Henry James as \"halls of humbug.\" Yet physical collections were only one of the myriad ways that these naturalists captured, catalogued, and commemorated America's rich biodiversity. They also turned to writing and art, from John Edward Holbrook's forays into the fascinating world of herpetology to John James Audubon's masterful portraits of American birds. In this groundbreaking, now classic book, Christoph Irmscher argues that early American natural historians developed a distinctly poetic sensibility that allowed them to imagine themselves as part of, and not apart from, their environment. He also demonstrates what happens to such inclusiveness in the hands of Harvard scientist-turned Amazonian explorer Louis Agassiz, whose racist pseudoscience appalled his student William James.  This expanded, full-color edition of The Poetics of Natural History features a preface and art from award-winning artist Rosamond Purcell and invites the reader to be fully immersed in an era when the boundaries between literature, art, and science became fluid.

The Manitoba Morning Free Press reportage seemed to perseverate on his liquor-law offences. On 25 February 1893 the Free Press reported he had acquired a black bear sow and her four three-week-old cubs, one of which was an unusual albino anda second a cinnamon. The grand spectacle \"Dan McDonald's Great Wild West Show\" brought together \"a varied collection ofwild animals, birds, zoological curiosities, trained horses, monkeys, goats, etc. for his menagerie and hippodrome\" as well as human performers. Professor Downard's 24-piece band was \"vastly superior to the general run of circus bands.\"

In 1883 five Brazilian Botocudos were exhibited at Piccadilly Hall, London's popular theatre. This exhibition aimed to replicate in Europe the success achieved by the display of seven Botocudos, held the previous year by the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro at the Brazilian Anthropological Exhibition. Measured and studied by scientists from the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the Botocudos performed daily for the public in London, Manchester, and Sheffield, until they were sold to P.T. Barnum, joining the US tour of the Grand Ethnological Congress of the Bailey and Barnum Circus. This article emphasises the ambivalent trajectory between science and spectacle in these three different exhibition formats and versions. Illustrations, posters, photographs and newspaper reports are relied on as research sources.

This essay explores how the concept of enfreakment can be used to analyze older adult characters in late 1970s US American theatre, focusing on D.L. Coburn’s The Gin Game and Tennessee Williams’s This is the Peaceable Kingdom. These tragicomedies reflect societal fears and stigmas surrounding aging, linking back to the historical context of freak shows. Enfreakment intersects with themes of otherness and ableism, highlighting the sensationalism associated with freak culture. The social construction of P.T. Barnum’s freak and older adults as non-hybrids (Haim Hazan) shares common ground. Using a comparative approach and close reading, this research reveals that the fictional nursing home setting limits freedom and produces both repulsion and compassion through its residents, showcasing invective as a protocol of enfreakment.

This article shows how the exhibition of a white elephant, owned by Phineas Taylor Barnum, the American showman and trickster, became a forum to discuss nineteenth-century theories of race. To nineteenth-century Britons, white elephants were potent symbols of white superiority, allegedly holy to the kings of Siam and Burma, and worshipped because of their white pigmentation, even if this whiteness was artificially produced. When Barnum exhibited an authentic elephant of splotchy colouration, he provoked a debate about the elephant's financial value and religious significance. In evaluating the beast, newspaper reports, scientific discussions and advertisements revealed a complex understanding of human whiteness, acknowledging that it was an artificial construct, and a status of the most superficial kind.

The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, in celebration of the quadricentennial anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Americas, spread over six hundred acres of reclaimed marsh lands in Chicago's South Side. Fourteen great buildings and two hundred additional buildings stood on the fairgrounds, and if tourists had visited every exhibit, they would have walked a total of 150 miles. Like other expositions, the World's Columbian Exposition was a white colonial construction rife with real and imagined exhibits fairgoers rarely challenged. Tourists did not concern themselves with any underlying docudramas that made Native performances possible, and it was within this heterotopic playground that Native American performers acted autonomously. This essay examines some of the more pressing concerns experienced by Native American performers who worked in seemingly contradictory ways and how they responded to the problems therein. Indian performers were not hapless victims of exploitative working conditions but, instead, creative resisters of the status quo at the World's Columbian Exposition. (Contains 87 notes.)