The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America

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.

ÝAn¨ intriguing and thoughtful book...Ýa¨ remarkable and disturbing story. -- Gary Gerstle "Washington Post"

This is a painful story of violence, white supremacy, and the exploitation of women. It must be passed on with great sensitivity and self-scrutiny on the part of the teller. Benjamin Reiss is that sort of teller. With "The Showman and the Slave," he has made a significant contribution to our understanding of antebellum history and culture. -- Bluford Adams "Ethnic and Racial Studies"

Superb...Benjamin Reiss Ýwrites¨ the history of entertainment exactly as it should be written: as a sophisticated interaction between presenters and observers that reveals much about the values of the age...Required reading for those interested in the broad sweep of nineteenth-century social history, as well as the history of entertainment, the popular press, science, race relations, slavery, abolitionism, business, gender studies, and historical memory. -- Paul Reddin "American Historical Review"

ChartsÝs¨ new theoretical territory...Combining incisive media analysis with careful historiography and literary critical readings... Reiss's study reveals how Barnum's representation of Heth and its public reception indexed emerging canons of taste and notions of class propriety; conflicting views about the body, sexuality, and gender; as well as anxieties and fantasies about technology and empire. Reiss forcefully argues that these various glimpses of "Barnum's America" must be understood within the context of shifting social attitudes about race and slavery in the antebellum North...Heth's story provides a salient marker for the centrality of the freak show to the national culture. -- Eden Osucha "American Literature"

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 161-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...The result is a book that is not merely intriguing history but a good read. -- Richard S. Newman "The New England Quarterly"

Reiss...uses P.T. Barnum's first hoax, the exhibiting of Joice Heth...to look at race relations in the antebellum North. This was one of the first media spectacles in US history; as such it provides a mirror of mid-19th-century society...Her exhibition and its aftermath brought into prominence several facets of antebellum cultural history, including the role of medical science, the importance of memories of revolutionary unity, attitudes toward death and religion, the role of women in public life, class competition, the effects of urbanization on culture, and the emergence of the mass media. Above all, exhibiting Heth provided ample opportunity for discussion of race and slavery...and for supplying evidence of northern psychological and material involvement in southern slavery. This should become a classic study of antebellum history. -- W. K. McNeil "Choice" (05/01/2002)

all... ["The Showman and the Slave" is a] wonderful, readable, smart book.

successful venture...The result is a book that is not merely intriguing history but a good read.

With "The Showman and the Slave," he has made a significant contribution to our understanding of antebellum history and culture.

as a model Christian overcoming her 'brutish' origins...[Does] what all academic history must, make[s] meanings and sense out of [its] material.