Robert Bogdan

Freak Show

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From 1840 until 1940, freak shows by the hundreds 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 exploitativethe 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, becoming the celebrities of their time, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimans.
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485 printed pages
Original publication
2014
Publication year
2014
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Quotes

  • Andrea N Morrisonhas quoted4 years ago
    For people in rural areas the circus’s arrival in town and the county fair were the only amusement they had.
  • Andrea N Morrisonhas quoted4 years ago
    The freak show was the main attraction of most dime museums of the period 1870–1900, and the human oddity was the king of museum entertainment (Hartt 1909, 108; McNamara 1974; Wilmeth 1982).
  • Andrea N Morrisonhas quoted4 years ago
    Starting in the 1870s dime museums proliferated, reaching their peak in the 1880s and 1890s. They operated from coast to coast, and any decent-sized city had one.

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