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

Reiss uses P. T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the race relations in the antebellum North. Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Heth was an enslaved woman said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. The newly emerging commercial press turned her act into one of the first media spectacles in American history.