Barnum's American Museum Illustrated 
(New York, 1850). Library of Congress.

Bluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

William T. Alderson, ed., Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastodons: The Emergence of the American Museum (Washington, D.C.: American Association of Museums, 1992).

Phineas Taylor Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (New York: Redfield, 1855).

__________. Struggles and Triumphs or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum Written by Himself (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981; abridgement of 1869 edition: NY: American News Company, 1871).

The Barnum Museum (Bridgeport, Connecticut)

Alex Boese, The Museum of Hoaxes (Joice Heth, FeJee Mermaid)

Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

Peter Buckley, "To the Opera House : Culture and Society in New York City, 1820-1860" (Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984).

Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

James W. Cook, "Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts: The Strange Career of P.T. Barnum's 'What is It?' Exhibition," in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Editor (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

__________, "From the Age of Reason to the Age of Barnum," Winterthur Portfolio, 30:4 (Winter 1995).

__________, "Mass Marketing and Cultural History: The Case of P. T. Barnum," American Quarterly, 51:1 (March 1999).

Andrea Stulman Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997).

Linda Frost, "The Circassian Beauty and the Circassian Slave: Gender, Imperialism, and American Popular Entertainment," in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Editor (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as A Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum: America's Greatest Showman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992).

Benjamin Reiss, "P. T. Barnum, Joice Heth, and Antebellum Spectacles of Race," American Quarterly, 51:1 (March 1999).

A. H. Saxon, P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

__________, ed., Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).



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