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Circus --- Barnum, P. T.
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Dioramas and panoramas, freaks and magicians, waxworks and menageries, obscure relics and stuffed animals--a dazzling assortment of curiosities attracted the gaze of the nineteenth-century spectator at the dime museum. This distinctly American phenomenon was unprecedented in both the diversity of its amusements and in its democratic appeal, with audiences traversing the boundaries of ethnicity, gender, and class. Andrea Stulman Dennett's Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America recaptures this ephemeral and scarcely documented institution of American culture from the margins of history. Weird and Wonderful chronicles the evolution of the dime museum from its eighteenth-century inception as a "cabinet of curiosities" to its death at the hands of new amusement technologies in the early twentieth century. From big theaters which accommodated audiences of three thousand to meager converted storefronts exhibiting petrified wood and living anomalies, this study vividly reanimates the array of museums, exhibits, and performances that make up this entertainment institution. Tracing the scattered legacy of the dime museum from vaudeville theater to Ripley's museum to the talk show spectacles of today, Dennett makes a significant contribution to the history of American popular entertainment.
Popular culture --- Eccentrics and eccentricities --- Curiosities and wonders --- Dime museums --- Museums --- History. --- Museums --- History. --- Museums --- History. --- History. --- History. --- Barnum, P. T. --- Barnum's American Museum. --- Weird. --- Wonderful. --- amusement. --- cabinet. --- century. --- chronicles. --- curiosities. --- death. --- dime. --- early. --- eighteenth-century. --- evolution. --- from. --- hands. --- inception. --- museum. --- technologies. --- twentieth.
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This book holds classical liberalism responsible for an American concept of beauty that centers upon women, wilderness, and machines. For each of the three beauty components, a cultural entrepreneur supremely sensitive to liberalism’s survival agenda is introduced. P.T. Barnum’s exhibition of Jenny Lind is a masterful combination of female elegance and female potency in the subsistence realm. John Muir’s Yosemite Valley is surely exquisite, but only after a rigorous liberal education prepares for its experience. And Harley Earl’s 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air is a dreamy expressionist sculpture, but with a practical 265 cubic inch V-8 underneath. Not that American beauty has been uniformly pragmatic. The 1950s are reconsidered for having temporarily facilitated a relaxation of the liberal survival priorities, and the creations of painter Jackson Pollock and jazz virtuoso Ornette Coleman are evaluated for their resistance to the pressures of pragmatism. The author concludes with a provocative speculation regarding a future liberal habitat where Emerson’s admonition to attach stars to wagons is rescinded. .
Aesthetics, American --- Political aspects. --- American aesthetics --- Political theory. --- United States-Politics and gover. --- United States-Study and teaching. --- Political Theory. --- US Politics. --- American Culture. --- Administration --- Civil government --- Commonwealth, The --- Government --- Political theory --- Political thought --- Politics --- Science, Political --- Social sciences --- State, The --- United States—Politics and government. --- United States—Study and teaching. --- Barnum, P. T. --- Muir, John, --- Earl, Harley. --- Earl, Harley J. --- Barnum, Phineas Taylor, --- Parn̲am, P. T., --- Barnam, P. T., --- Political science. --- America --- Ethnology --- Culture. --- American Politics. --- Cultural sociology --- Culture --- Sociology of culture --- Civilization --- Popular culture --- Politics and government. --- America. --- Social aspects
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