The Showman and the Slave
Race, Death and Memory in Barnum's America
Benjamin Reiss(Author)
Harvard University Press
Published on 9. October 2001
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-0-674-00636-2 (ISBN)
Description
In this story about one of the 19th 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 connection between early mass culture and a slave's subtle mockery of her master.
Reviews / Votes
"Shares in a long and distinguished tradition of social and cultural histories that transform 'ordinary' events in the past into extraordinary windows onto their worlds." - Bryan J. Wolf, Yale UniversityMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
12 halftones, bibliographical references, index
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 156 mm
Weight
620 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-674-00636-2 (9780674006362)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
07/2009
Harvard University Press
€71.99
Available for download