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The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America. By Benjamin Reiss. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. x, 267. $29.95.)
Slavery generated incredible amounts of wealth. Banks, insurance companies, and early factories and railroads all derived significant capital from the institution. As historians of race, popular culture, and antebellum society have shown in recent years, slavery also gave rise to new forms of entertainment, launched show business careers, and skewed popular discourse in favor of whiteness in the years leading up to the Civil War. It might be said, then, that slavery (and race) generated not just financial but cultural capital; and in many ways this metaphorical currency was as important in antebellum America as the literal currency derived from slavery.
Benjamin Reiss's study of the legendary P. T. Barnum illuminates the significance of race's cultural capital beyond the plantation. Barnum's is a name familiar to most Americans. But how many people know that the great showman got his start in the 1830s promoting a racial curiosity: Joice Heth, a supposedly i6i-year-old black woman and slave who, Barnum claimed, had once cared for an infant George Washington? Barnum publicized this so-called "curiosity" in 1835 just as American popular entertainment exploded with the penny press and blackface comedy. The Showman and the Slave expertly elucidates the multiple meanings of Barnum's first successful venture. Reiss explores everything from Barnum's own shifting racial beliefs to the real-life background of Joice Heth. The result is a book that is not merely intriguing history but a good read.
The story of the showman and the slave spans only a few months-- from August 1835, when...