The life of pt barnum6/1/2023 ![]() He was living in New York City, employed at a boarding home and in a grocery store, and was hungry for a money-making gimmick. ![]() Growing up in the antebellum North, Barnum took his first real dip into showmanship at age 25 when he purchased the right to “rent” an aged black woman by the name of Joice Heth, whom an acquaintance was trumpeting around Philadelphia as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington.īy this time, Barnum had tried working as a lottery manager, a shopkeeper and newspaper editor. “here are various trades and occupations which need only notoriety to insure success,” he claimed, concluding no harm, no foul, so long as at the end of the day customers felt like they got their money’s worth. Each were full of bigger-than-life ideas marketed to an audience interested in mass, and often crass, entertainment.Īs it was “generally understood,” Barnum wrote in the book, the term humbug “consists in putting on glittering appearances-outside show-novel expedients, by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and attract the public eye and ear.” And Barnum wanted to make it clear such a practice was justified. and Barnum & Bailey” circus) near the end of his life. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome" (the predecessor of “Ringling Bros. His legacy in show business stretched from the American Museum to "P. ![]() Barnum's career trafficked in curiosities, which he served up to a public hungry for such entertainment, regardless of how factual or ethical such displays were. ![]()
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