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The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America
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.
1112326775
The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America
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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The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America
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.
Benjamin Reiss is Professor of English, Emory University.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Dark Subject 1
I Death and Dying
1 Possession 13
2 The Celebrated Curiosity 28
3 Private Acts, Public Memories 52
4 Sacred and Profane 71
5 Culture Wars 90
6 Love, Automata, and India Rubber 106
7 Spectacle 126
II Resurrection
8 Authenticity and Commodity 143
9 Exposure and Mastery 159
10 Erasure 183
III Life
11 A Speculative Biography 211
Note to the 2010 Printing 225
Notes 227
Index 261
What People are Saying About This
Bryan J. Wolf
This book 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 University
Ronald G. Walters
A good and engaging read. A mystery story, an attempt to sort through conflicting, often fragmentary, evidence to give the most plausible account of a bizarre, perhaps transformative, moment in American popular culture. — Ronald G. Walters, Johns Hopkins University
