Freak Show

Freak Show
Author: Robert Bogdan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2014-12-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 022622743X

This cultural history of the travelling freak show in America chronicles the rise and fall of the industry as attitudes about disability evolved. From 1840 until 1940, hundreds of freak shows crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today’s standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative—the pornography of disability. Yet for one hundred years the freak show was widely accepted as one of America’s most popular forms of entertainment. Robert Bogdan’s fascinating social history brings to life the world of the freak show and explores the culture that nurtured and, later, abandoned it. In uncovering this neglected chapter of show business, he describes in detail the flimflam artistry behind the shows, the promoters and the audiences, and the gradual evolution of public opinion from awe to embarrassment. Freaks were not born, Bogdan reveals; they were manufactured by the amusement world, usually with the active participation of the freaks themselves. Many of the "human curiosities" found fame and fortune, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimens.

Truevine

Truevine
Author: Beth Macy
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2016-10-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0316337560

The true story of two African-American brothers who were kidnapped and displayed as circus freaks, and whose mother endured a 28-year struggle to get them back. The year was 1899 and the place a sweltering tobacco farm in the Jim Crow South town of Truevine, Virginia. George and Willie Muse were two little boys born to a sharecropper family. One day a white man offered them a piece of candy, setting off events that would take them around the world and change their lives forever. Captured into the circus, the Muse brothers performed for royalty at Buckingham Palace and headlined over a dozen sold-out shows at New York's Madison Square Garden. They were global superstars in a pre-broadcast era. But the very root of their success was in the color of their skin and in the outrageous caricatures they were forced to assume: supposed cannibals, sheep-headed freaks, even "Ambassadors from Mars." Back home, their mother never accepted that they were "gone" and spent 28 years trying to get them back. Through hundreds of interviews and decades of research, Beth Macy expertly explores a central and difficult question: Where were the brothers better off? On the world stage as stars or in poverty at home? Truevine is a compelling narrative rich in historical detail and rife with implications to race relations today.

Slouching Towards Kalamazoo

Slouching Towards Kalamazoo
Author: Peter De Vries
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2012-08-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 022614920X

The classic American coming of age novel of a precocious young man and the lessons learned from his tutor by “a masterly entertainer and social satirist” (The New York Times). It is 1963 in an unnamed town in North Dakota, and Anthony Thrasher is languishing for a second year in eighth grade. Prematurely sophisticated, young Anthony spends too much time reading Joyce, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas but not enough time studying the War of 1812 or obtuse triangles. A tutor is hired, and this "modern Hester Prynne" offers Anthony lessons that ultimately free him from eighth grade and situate her on the cusp of the American sexual revolution. In Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, Peter De Vries finds the perfect vehicle for his eridute wit in Anthony’s restless adolescent voice. Demonstrating a fascination with both language and female anatomy, Anthony’s pitch-perfect narration propels this satirical coming of age tale through theological debates and quandaries both dermatological and ethical, while soaring on the De Vriesian hallmark of scrambling conventional wisdom for comic effect.

Africans on Stage

Africans on Stage
Author: Bernth Lindfors
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1999
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780253212450

Ethnological show business has a very long history in Europe. It became increasingly common after advances in navigational technology put Europeans in touch with human communities all over the globe.In the 19th and 20th centuries some of the most interesting individuals and groups exhibited in Europe and America came from Africa. What did the average spectator think of such representatives from the "Dark Continent"? If the display was a dramatic one -- that is, if the Africans sang, danced or acted out events -- what opinions did observers form of them as performers and as human beings? How was the spectacle staged, and who organized and managed the show? How authentic were these performances? Where did the performers actually come from? What notions about Africa and Africans were these exhibitions meant to convey?Africans on Stage is a book about how these three groups -- players, promoters, and spectators -- helped to shape European and American perceptions of Africans. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Horrible Histories Special: Wicked Words

Horrible Histories Special: Wicked Words
Author: Terry Deary
Publisher: Scholastic UK
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2013-09-05
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1407137212

Discover why words rule in this wicked book of them! Find out why they say the pen is mightier than the sword! Terry Deary runs riot through the horrible history of the English language in a book to leave you (and your teacher) speechless.

Bushmen

Bushmen
Author: Alan Barnard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2019-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108418260

A comprehensive and fascinating account of all the major groups of southern African hunter-gatherers.

Where the Roads All End

Where the Roads All End
Author: Ilisa Barbash
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0873654099

Where the Roads All End tells the remarkable story of an American family’s expeditions to the Kalahari Desert in the 1950s. Raytheon founder Laurence Marshall and his family recorded the lives of the last remaining hunter-gatherers, the so-called Bushmen, in what is now recognized as one of the most important anthropology ventures in Africa.

Clicko

Clicko
Author: Neil Parsons
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2010-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0226647420

Originally published: Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2009.