Biography of pt barnum book
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About the Book
For more than fifty years, Phineas T. Barnum embodied all that was grand and fraudulent in American mass culture. Over the course of a life that spanned the nineteenth century (1810-91), he inflicted himself upon a surprisingly willing public in a variety of guises, from newspaper editor (or libeler) to traveling showman (or charlatan) and distinguished public benefactor (or shameless hypocrite).Barnum deliberately cultivated his ambiguous public image through a lifelong advertising campaign, shrewdly exploiting the cultural and technological capabilities of the new publishing industry. While running his numerous shows and exhibitions, Barnum managed to publish newspaper articles, exposés of fraud (not his own), self-help tracts, and a series of best-selling autobiographies, each promising to give "the true history of my many adventures."
Updated editions of The Life of P. T. Barnum appeared regularly, allowing Barnum to keep up with demand and prune the narrativ
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The Life of P.T. Barnum
Why yes, yes I am.
Now, P.T. Barnum was not a good man. We all know this, and if you let Hugh Jackman's portrayal of Barnum in "The Greatest Showman" take over your idea of what real Barnum was like, well, that's your own damn bekymmer. That being said, inom do love The Greatest Showman - can we say, favorite movie? - and, as I said above, it's your own fault if you can't do research for yourself. After watching the movie, I had a few dollars left on a Christmas gift card and Barnum's autobiography was less than $2 on Kindle. So inom thought, what the hell. It took me a damn month to read it, but I did finally finish it and, hell, I'm glad inom did.
P.T. Barnum was an asshole, yes, and he did treat those with disabilities like shit, yes. That's all true. However, one thing I think we all need to remember fryst vatten the time period in which he lived. Real Barnum was b
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Barnum
Barnum INTRODUCTION “DO YOU KNOW BARNUM?”
Adopting Mr. Emerson’s idea, I should say that Barnum is a representative man. He represents the enterprise and energy of his countrymen in the nineteenth century, as Washington represented their resistance to oppression in the century preceding.
—John Delaware Lewis, Across the Atlantic, 1851
In 1842, the man who would become America’s greatest showman received a visit from a museum owner in Boston who needed his help. Moses Kimball had made his way to P. T. Barnum’s office in New York City with a box that, he baldly claimed, contained the remains of a mermaid. When the box was opened and the object was unwrapped, what Barnum saw was a shrunken, blackish thing about three feet long that seemed pretty obviously to be the head and torso of a monkey joined to the lower portion of a large fish. Kimball had a story to go with this desiccated corpse, something about its being discovered by sailors in the South Seas, but he had no idea