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The Showman and the Slave - Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America (Paperback)
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The Showman and the Slave - Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America (Paperback)
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In this compelling story about one of the nineteenth century's most
famous Americans, Benjamin 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 who was 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.
In piecing together the fragmentary and conflicting evidence of the
event, Reiss paints a picture of people looking at history, at the
human body, at social class, at slavery, at performance, at death,
and always--if obliquely--at themselves. At the same time, he
reveals how deeply an obsession with race penetrated different
facets of American life, from public memory to private fantasy.
Concluding the book is a piece of historical detective work in
which Reiss attempts to solve the puzzle of Heth's real identity
before she met Barnum. His search yields a tantalizing connection
between early mass culture and a slave's subtle mockery of her
master.
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