The Showman and the Slave : : Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America / / Benjamin Reiss.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter HUP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013 (Canada)
• VerfasserIn: Reiss, Benjamin,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2022]; ©2001
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (281 p.)
• Other title: Frontmatter --; CONTENTS --; FIGURES --; AckrunvZedgments --; Introduction: The Dark Subject --; 1. DEATH AND DYING --; 1. Possession --; 2. The Celebrated Curiosity --; 3. Private Acts, Public Memories --; 4. Sacred and Profane --; 5. Culture Wars --; 6. Love, Automata, and India Rubber --; 7. Spectacle --; II. RESURRECTION --; 8. Authenticity and Commodity --; 9. Exposure and Mastery --; 10. Erasure --; III. LIFE --; 11. A Speculative Biography --; Note to the 2010 Printing --; Notes --; Index
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9780674042650; 9783110756067; 9783110442205
• DOI: 10.4159/9780674042650?locatt=mode:legacy
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Benjamin Reiss.

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 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.