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

by Benjamin Reiss (Author), Benjamin Reiss (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2010

  $44.10

  Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Joice Heth was an elderly enslaved woman who was said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. Telling the story about one of the nineteenth century's most famous Americans, the author uses P T Barnum's Joice hoax to examine the contours of race relations in the antebellum North.