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"Sideshows"
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The charlatan's boy : a novel
Grady knows nothing of his origins--he does not even have a last name--but as he and a huckster travel from one small, frontier town to another he poses one of the wild, ugly swamp beasts called feechies.
Book
Ragged but right : black traveling shows, \coon songs,\ and the dark pathway to blues and jazz
The commercial explosion of ragtime in the early twentieth century created previously unimagined opportunities for black performers. However, every prospect was mitigated by systemic racism. The biggest hits of the ragtime era weren't Scott Joplin's stately piano rags. \"Coon songs,\" with their ugly name, defined ragtime for the masses, and played a transitional role in the commercial ascendancy of blues and jazz.
InRagged but Right, now in paperback, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff investigate black musical comedy productions, sideshow bands, and itinerant tented minstrel shows. Ragtime history is crowned by the \"big shows,\" the stunning musical comedy successes of Williams and Walker, Bob Cole, and Ernest Hogan. Under the big tent of Tolliver's Smart Set, Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, and others were converted from \"coon shouters\" to \"blues singers.\"Throughout the ragtime era and into the era of blues and jazz, circuses and Wild West shows exploited the popular demand for black music and culture, yet segregated and subordinated black performers to the sideshow tent. Not to be confused with their nineteenth-century white predecessors, black, tented minstrel shows such as the Rabbit's Foot andSilas Green from New Orleansprovided blues and jazz-heavy vernacular entertainment that black southern audiences identified with and took pride in.
eBook
The life she was given
\"On a summer evening in 1931, Lilly Blackwood glimpses circus lights from the grimy window of her attic bedroom. Lilly isn't allowed to explore the meadows around Blackwood Manor. She's never even ventured beyond her narrow room. Momma insists it's for Lilly's own protection, that people would be afraid if they saw her. But on this unforgettable night, Lilly is taken outside for the first time--and sold to the circus sideshow. More than two decades later, nineteen-year-old Julia Blackwood has inherited her parents' estate and horse farm. For Julia, home was an unhappy place full of strict rules and forbidden rooms, and she hopes that returning might erase those painful memories. Instead, she becomes immersed in a mystery involving a hidden attic room and photos of circus scenes featuring a striking young girl ... It will fall to Julia to learn the truth about Lilly's fate and her family's shocking betrayal, and find a way to make Blackwood Manor into a place of healing at last.\"--Jacket.
Book
For a Short Time Only
By the 1740s, colonists living in North America began to encounter scores of itinerant performers from England and Europe. These show people -- acrobats, wire dancers, tumblers, trick riders, painters, dancing-masters, waxworks proprietors, healers, and singing and language teachers -- brought novelty and culture to remote areas. Advertising in newspapers, they attracted audiences with the hook of appearing \"for a short time only.\"
In this richly illustrated and deeply researched book, Peter Benes examines the rise of early American popular culture through the lives and work of itinerants who circulated in British North America and the United States from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Although they were frequently reviled as quacks and absconders by many provincials, these transients enjoyed a unique camaraderie and found audiences among high- and lowbrow alike. Drawing on contemporary diaries, letters, reminiscences, and hitherto inaccessible newspaper ads, broadsides, and images, Benes suggests why some elements of Europe's carnival and folklore traditions failed to gain acceptance in American society while others flourished brilliantly.
eBook
The spectacle of deformity
In 1847, during the great age of the freak show, the British periodical Punch bemoaned the public's “prevailing taste for deformity.” This vividly detailed work argues that far from being purely exploitative, displays of anomalous bodies served a deeper social purpose as they generated popular and scientific debates over the meanings attached to bodily difference. Nadja Durbach examines freaks both well-known and obscure including the Elephant Man; “Lalloo, the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy,” a set of conjoined twins advertised as half male, half female; Krao, a seven-year-old hairy Laotian girl who was marketed as Darwin's “missing link”; the ”Last of the Mysterious Aztecs” and African “Cannibal Kings,” who were often merely Irishmen in blackface. Upending our tendency to read late twentieth-century conceptions of disability onto the bodies of freak show performers, Durbach shows that these spectacles helped to articulate the cultural meanings invested in otherness--and thus clarified what it meant to be British—at a key moment in the making of modern and imperial ideologies and identities.
eBook
Canadian carnival freaks and the extraordinary body, 1900-1970s
\"In 1973, a five year old girl known as Pookie was exhibited as \"The Monkey Girl\" at the Canadian National Exhibition. Pookie was the last of a number of children exhibited as 'freaks' in twentieth-century Canada. Jane Nicholas takes us on a search for answers about how and why the freak show persisted into the 1970s. In Canadian Carnival Freaks and the Extraordinary Body, 1900-1970s, Nicholas offers a sophisticated analysis of the place of the freak show in twentieth-century culture. Freak shows survived and thrived because of their flexible business model, government support, and by mobilizing cultural and medical ideas of the body and normalcy. This book is the first full length study of the freak show in Canada and is a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of Canadian popular culture, attitudes toward children, and the social construction of able-bodiness. Based on an impressive research foundation, the book will be of particular interest to anyone interested in the history of disability, the history of childhood, and the history of consumer culture.\"-- Provided by publisher.
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The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded
Twenty years ago, Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault introduced the concept of attraction to define the quintessence of the earliest films made between 1895 and 1906. As \"cinema of attractions\" this concept has be come widely adopted, even outside the field of early cinema. Ranging from the films of the Lumière brothers to The Matrix by Andy and Larry Wachowski, from trains rushing into the audience to bullet time effects, the \"cinema of attractions\" is a cinema that shocks, astonishes and directly addresses the film spectator.
This anthology traces the history of the \"cinema of attractions,\" reconstructs its conception and questions its attractiveness and usefulness for both pre-classical and post-clas sical cinema. With contributions by Christa Blümlinger, Warren Buckland, Scott Bukatman, Donald Crafton, Nicolas Dulac, Thomas Elsaes ser, André Gaudreault, Laurent Guido, Tom Gunning, Malte Hagener, Pierre-Emmanuel Jaques, Charlie Keil, Frank Kessler, Germain Lacasse, Alison McMahan, Charles Musser, Viva Paci, Eivind Røssaak, Vivian Sobchack, Wanda Strauven, Dick Tomasovic.
eBook
The electric woman : a memoir in death-defying acts
\"[This book] follows the author on a life-affirming journey of loss and self-discovery--hrough her time on the road with the last traveling American sideshow and her relationship with an adventurous, spirited mother\"-- Provided by publisher.
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