Stringer Fall13
Transcription
Stringer Fall13
The Guayabera: Heritage, Customs, Family Terms of Endearment: Chenhall’s Nomenclature The Legacy of Dime Museums Reflections on Experience A u t u mn 2 0 1 3 V O L U M E 6 8 , # 4 7 THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR STATE AND LOCAL HISTORY 24 Features 7A Town and Gown Partnership: Collaborative Learning in Indiana, Pennsylvania By Jeanine Mazak-Kahne, and Coleen Chambers 13The Legacy of Dime Museums and the Freakshow: How the Past Impacts the Present 19 By Katie Stringer 19 Reflections on Experience: Listening to Visitors By David Thelen, Ellen M. Rosenthal, and Barbara Franco 24 Terms of Endearment: Nomenclature—How did it Begin; Where is it Going? By Ron Kley 13 Departments 3On Doing Local History By Carol Kammen 5History Bytes By Tim Grove 28Award Winner Spotlight By Rikki Davenport 30Book Reviews By Linda Eikmeier Endersby and Anne McCudden ON THE COVER Guayabera, 2012. Since the first-four pocket peasant shirt, place, time, function, and meaning have transformed the guyabera. One popular notion concerning its design is that the shirt’s back may have been influenced by the design of the Cuban flag. Photo courtesy HistoryMiami History News exists to foster publication, scholarly research, and an open forum for discussion of best practices, applicable theories, and professional experiences pertinent to the field of state and local history. For information on article submissions and review, see www.aaslh.org/ historynews. Articles typically run 2,500 words in length. History News (ISSN 0363-7492) is published quarterly by the American Association for State and Local History, a nonprofit educational membership organization providing leadership, service, and support for its members who preserve and interpret state and local history in order to make the past more meaningful in American society. 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For membership information contact Gina Sawyer, 1717 Church Street, Nashville TN 37203-2991; 615-320-3203; fax 615-327-9013; e-mail: [email protected]. 1717 Church Street Nashville, Tennessee 37203-2991 615-320-3203, Fax 615-327-9013 [email protected], www.aaslh.org History News is a quarterly membership publication of the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH). It provides articles on current trends, timely issues, and best practices for professional development and the overall improvement of the field of state and local history. EDITOR Bob Beatty Managing Editor Bethany L. Hawkins DESIGN Go Design, LLC ms u e s u M e im D f o y c a g e L e h T and the Freakshow nt e s e r P e th ts c a p Im t s a P e th How By Katie Stringer untary, but most often were acts of desperation from people the mass culture considered to be “freaks.” The place of those individuals with disabilities is an important piece of the past that informs present displays and exhibits, museum policies, and popular attitudes. Even today, modern sideshows are available to the public in various forums. To understand the impact that the past had on the present, it is important to first understand what a freakshow is or was, and what defines a “freak.” The exhibitions of people who are different have been called many things: Raree Shows, Halls of Human Curiosities, Sideshows, Pitshows, Odditoriums, Congress of Oddities, Collections of Human Wonders, Museum of Nature’s Mistakes, and Freakshows. One of the first examples of a traveling exhibit of a person appeared in 1738, in a colonial American newspaper. The paper ran an advertisement for an exhibit of a person who “was taken in a wood at Guinea, ’tis a female about four feet high, in every part like a woman excepting her head which nearly resembles the ape.” New York and Cincinnati: Strobridge & Co. Lith. Accessed through the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division I began writing my dissertation for Middle Tennessee State University’s Public History Ph.D. program in 2012 with the idea that my research would culminate in a practical plan for museums and historic sites to go beyond the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to welcome visitors with all disabilities and abilities to have meaningful experiences. Throughout history there have been many populations that have been discriminated against or ignored by institutions and organizations of all types. The same is true of museums, and some might argue that those problems still exist today. Even with the ADA it seems that museums and historic organizations are still behind in reaching out to and welcoming people with disabilities. As I researched the history of museums, it was clear that almost all began as institutes for the wealthy, educated elite classes. As dime museums became popular, they were opened to even the lowest classes, but as you will read below, the institutions did not seem to welcome visitors with disabilities except as exhibitions. Once these shows took to the road, they became sideshows or freakshows, often accompanying circuses. The shows became inextricably tied to the term “exhibition” and in some cases, even museum. My research on freakshows as exhibitions helps to inform museums on this somewhat sordid past, and can offer context for those institutions that are trying to go beyond assumed limitations to become true community centers for all members of society. Dime Museums and Freakshows From the popular Coney Island amusement area in New York City to traveling circuses and sideshows, exhibits that featured people with physical differences were some of the most prevalent attractions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dime museums and national exhibitions up to the mid-twentieth century often featured humans who were considered “different” for the public to view and experience. The exhibition of people in these shows was sometimes vol- Print from 1898 reads: “The Barnum and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth. The Peerless Prodigies of Physical Phenomena. [with] Smallest Man Alive [and] the Congo Giant.” H i s t o r y n e ws 13 Photograph by Jack Delano. From the Library of Congress Prints Photographs Division Washington, DC Outside a freakshow at the Rutland Fair in Vermont. Throughout the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, freakshows or sideshows were among the most popular attractions for the middle-class public.1 From 1840 until 1940, freakshows were at their height. Historians typically mark 1840 as the beginning of the freakshow era. That was the year P.T. Barnum began the American Museum, a New York City attraction that cost a dime to enter. The museum contained many exhibits of historic artifacts and gaffes, faked items made to trick the viewer. The museum also housed many people who were considered to be rarities worthy of exhibition. These people included: General Tom Thumb, a person with dwarfism; the Aztec Twins; albinos; the “What is It?” a person with microcephaly; and many other “living curiosities.”2 Barnum’s American Museum was, in a sense, following in the footsteps of the earliest museums of the Western world. Considered to be the first modern museum, the Ashmolean Museum in England opened at Oxford University in 1683. It is generally thought to be the first museum established by a public body for the public benefit. The collection contained natural history specimens, coins, books, and art and was essentially a “cabinet of curiosities.” Anthony Wood described the Ashmolean Museum as a building “necessary in order to the promoting and carrying on with greater ease and success severall parts of usefull [sic] and curious learning.” The museum had ten rooms and three of those were open to the public. Collections included the “hieroglyphicks [sic] and other Egyptian antiquities” donated by Dr. Robert Huntingdon, an “intire [sic] mummy,” and “Romane [sic] antiquities.” These collections represent what was foreign, entertaining, and intriguing to Oxford students, faculty, and residents.3 In 1865 a fire destroyed P. T. Barnum’s original American Museum. The New York Times listed many of the items of interest that had been lost in the fire, though none of the people who were exhibited died. A newspaper article published in 1865 claimed that Barnum was constructing a new museum to replace the old. The author claimed, “The fact is, that the loss of the museum was a national calamity.”4 14 Autumn 2013 When Barnum’s museum burned in 1865, few complained. In The Nation, Edwin Lawrence Godkin exclaimed, “The worst and most corrupt classes of our people must seek some new place of resort.” He then questioned whether visitors were more upset by the fire that destroyed the museum or the state of the artifacts in the museum. Godkin asserted that the “insufficiency, disorder, neglected condition” of the museum should have insulted visitors. To Godkin, museums had to be more professional, educational, and limited in the audience they sought to attract. He concluded, “The profoundly scientific are not those who care for public museums, unless containing this or that unique treasure. The frequenters of museums are those who cannot themselves give much time or means to the collection, classification, and study of specimens, but who read in the evenings and would gladly see by day a larger number and greater variety of helps to understand than their own limited time has sufficed to discover.” Godkin called for a new museum that would do justice to that title. He said, “It is in behalf of all classes of the community, except that vicious and degraded one by which the late ‘American Museum’ was largely monopolized, that we ask the community for a building and for collections that shall be worthy of the name so sadly misapplied.”5 However, the museum yet again burned to the ground in 1868 and was not rebuilt. Instead, Barnum took his show on the road, thus founding one of America’s most famous traveling circuses and sideshows.6 Based on Barnum’s model, entrepreneurs organized exhibitions of people with physical, mental, and behavioral disabilities or impairments to attract the public and generate a profit. Many times they advertised these exhibitions as educational and scientific. Barnum’s museum and others like it became known as dime museums. Often, they housed gaffes or fake objects and people, and were little more than a circus or carnival sideshow exhibit. While people likely did not conflate museums with sideshows, the sideshows generally billed themselves as educational, and the sideshow did grow out of the dime museum tradition.7 These exhibitions allowed the general population to see “dioramas, panoramas, georamas, cosmoramas, paintings, relics, freaks, stuffed animals, menageries, waxworks, and theatrical performance.” The museums served as escapes for Victorian Americans who suddenly had leisure time thanks in part to the industrial revolution. For many, the word “museum” thus became irrevocably associated with the weird, strange, and unknown since many of the sideshows and attractions were erroneously labeled museums.8 Freakshows and Humanity Once the sideshow or freakshow became an entity of its own, organizers named the people integral to these attractions curiosities, rarities, oddities, wonders, mistakes, prodigies, special people, and even monsters. The bally shouters and fair organizers categorized performers into different races and natural mistakes, such as giants, people without arms or legs, obese, conjoined twins, “wild” men hailed to have been from foreign and unexplored lands, little people, albinos, and more. People with physical disabilities or anomalies were generally called “born different” peoples, unlike those who were “made freaks” by swallowing swords or nailing objects into their heads.9 By labeling a person a freak, the sideshow removed the humanity of the performer because he or she might not have the same physical characteristics of the “normal” person, and authorized the paying customer to approach the person as an object of curiosity and entertainment. To reconcile the exploitation of people who were different as curiosities worthy of admission price, society had only to take away their humanity.10 Primary sources reveal little criticism of the exhibition of people with disabilities. Instead, many scientists and doctors accepted and assisted such displays as educational experiences, and they attended the exhibits as well to examine and comment on them. Though scientists studied the people in the exhibits and wrote articles about them, none of the articles critique the display of people with disabilities for public amusement and entertainment.11 In Boston in 1850, the popular exhibition of Maximo and Bartola, the Aztec Children, featured them dressed in outfits with Aztec designs and feathers, was an immediate success not only among the public but also with the scientific community. One observer claimed that to everyone the children were “subjects deserving of careful scrutiny and thoughtful observation…they must be objects of vivid interest.” The fact that the children seemed to be severely cognitively impaired was not addressed in the booklet that accompanied the exhibit or by observers.12 Eventually, in 1985, the complaints of concerned citizens prompted the last remaining freakshow, New York State Fair’s Sutton Sideshow attraction, to be moved away from the midway of the park. The term “freak” was no longer an acceptable term for people with disabilities in the amusement industry. This reaction recognized the reality that freakshows were crude, exploitative, and somewhat embarrassing to society; it has even been called the “pornography of disability.”13 “The History of the ADA: A Movement Perspective,” the ADA did not begin with the congressional legislation of 1990. It began much earlier with the people and communities that fought against discrimination.14 Legally, the shift towards disability equality began in 1973 when Congress passed Section 504: the Rehabilitation Act, which banned discrimination based on disability for the receiving of federal funds. Following this action the disability civil rights movement gained momentum, and in 1988, the Americans with Disabilities Act first appeared before Congress. In 1990, Congress passed the act giving rights to people with disabilities that had previously not been guaranteed by federal law. Essentially, the law protected against disability discrimination in employment; public services, public accommodation, and services operated by private entities; transportation; and telecommunications. Interestingly, as institutions and citizens grew accustomed to compliance with ADA requirements, the freakshow reappeared in American popular culture, albeit in a different format. This was especially true at Brooklyn’s Coney Island. The reboot of sideshows and freaks in the United States focuses more on “self-made” freaks than “born-differents.” This suggests that people who are considered to be freakish in some way by societies are embracing the term and using the title as a power term. The shift from “born different” to “self-made” freaks in sideshows and other displays is shown in the sideshows of Coney Island today, television shows, and movies. Writing in Disability Quarterly Studies in 2005, Elizabeth Stephens details the differences between those born with a disability and those who are “made freaks.” She adds, “The wonder and anxiety generated by the body of the self-made freak arises not from the randomness of its physical difference, as responses to the ‘born’ freak did, but at its celebration of different capabilities and aesthetics.”15 The freakshow revival is not just apparent at Coney Island. In fall 2012, a new television program Freakshow premiered on the American Movie Channel. The show follows the Venice Beach Freakshow performers in a reality show format. Its trailer features several individuals with physical disabilities. The main character, owner, and performer Todd Ray notes, “Freak is one of the most positive words I can think of; for us freak means normal.”16 Coney Island is banking on the freakshow, in part to continue to Signs inside Coney Island, USA’s fuel a resurgence of popuFreak Bar directing visitors to the larity among locals and Sideshow or Museum. tourists. Coney Island USA has been working to revitalize the area for many years. On the boardwalk, the organization houses a museum, a sideshow, and a freak bar for visitors to experience aspects of Coney Island at its prime. Impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act In 1988, historian Robert Bogdan argued that the freakshow was a dying exhibition style that would not be around for much longer for financial reasons and propriety’s sake. In 1990, Congress approved the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA was the first major legislation that provided a promise of equality to all people with disabilities. However, Arelene Mayerson argued in er ng tri eS ti Ka H i s t o r y n e ws 15 The museum contains information about the history of Coney Island, some examples of gaffes that were popular in sideshows, and even a cyclorama that portrays the burning of Dreamland in the early twentieth century. A board of directors operates Coney Island USA. Its board chair in 2012 when I visited, was Dr. Jeffery Birnbaum, a a physician who has been studying sideshow performers with physical disabilities. Additionally, he is a pediatrician with HEAT (Health and Education Alternatives for Teens), of which he is the founder, director, and physician. Dr. Birnbaum has also studied sideshow performers, congenital malformations, disabilities, and the medical community.17 Today, Coney Island still operates one of the only sideshows in the country. Its website proclaims, “Sideshows by the Seashore is the last permanently housed place in the United States where you can experience the thrill of a traditional ten-in-one circus sideshow. They’re here, they’re real, and they’re alive! Freaks, wonders, and human curiosities!” In an age of ADA, disability rights, and varying degrees of political correctness, it can be hard to see how a sideshow can fit into the modern world. In May 2012, Coney Island USA had just completed its annual Congress of Curious Peoples, at which there are exhibitions of people, speeches, parties, and inductions into the Sideshow Hall of Fame for such categories as “Born Differents” and “Self Inflicted.”18 Dr. Birnbaum shared information about several people he knows who participate in sideshows or other types of shows to raise awareness about disability issues. Matt Fraser is to the sideshow world a “seal boy” or person with phocomalia, and he is also a disability rights activist who uses his disability in his performance. He uses his impairment to make the audience uncomfortable for laughing and having fun, since almost all people are conditioned to ignore or remain sympathetic Coney toward people with disabilities.19 Island USA’s An interview with Jason Black from Austin, Museum and Texas, addressed key questions about disabilSideshows ity and the sideshow in today’s world. Black is by the known in the sideshow and entertainment world Seashore with as the Black Scorpion, and in the past he may “Museum” have been known as a human lobster because of written his impairment. Black is affected by prominently ectrodactyly, an across the top of the building. r ge trin eS Katie Stringer ti Ka attribute present at birth in which one or more digits from the hand or foot is missing, and the effect is a claw-like appearance. Black commented in an email, “I am the Black Scorpion. I do participate in freakshow/sideshow performances…. The world I’ve grown up in is one that can be, at times, hardheaded and difficult to communicate with, because of preconceived notions or thoughts, if you will, as to who someone with different [fill in the blank] is supposed to be…. What I do on stage is magic, not because of illusions or tricks but because of soul. I try to change preconceived negatives into positives and at times fail miserably when agendas have already put blinders along someone’s path through our world.” The world in which Black grew up is very different from that of his predecessors in the sideshow experience. Rather than displaying himself simply as a freak, Black tries to change people’s impressions of freaks.20 When asked how things might have been different if he had lived during the peak of sideshows, Black remarked, “I probably would have made more money, owned a show, and my act would have been slightly different…or I may have been chased by an angry mob of villager—with pitchforks and torches into a barn only to be silently killed by my creator.” Though this may be an exaggeration, the changes from the past to today remain evident. Black replied to a question about exploitation of himself and his disability in his show. “I think when folks see my act, the word ‘exploit’ doesn’t really cross their minds, though I could be wrong…. Negative feedback I’ve received has always been of the political nature, usually geriatric white men upset over something I’ve said. I mostly teach about and share experiences of life with ectrodactyly. But really all performers are exploiting themselves.”21 Dr. Birnbaum explained that in the past, the disability community often viewed people who performed as taking part in something equal to pornography. Today, however, many in this population see it as a “rock ‘n’ roll career.” Rather than the negative stigma originally associated with the term “freak,” today many people in the sideshow community embrace the term. In New York City and along the east coast, many people seek out the unofficial mayor of Coney Island, Dick Zigun, in hopes that they will be chosen to appear at Sideshows by the Seashore.22 Though Coney Island does not employ any people with intellectual disabilities as performers, Dr. Birnbaum divulged a story about a child with microcephaly born in New York City but abandoned at a local hospital. A hospital worker knew of Birnbaum’s interest in sideshows and his work with Coney Island, and the hospital employee asked if he would adopt the child to give him a career at Coney Island. Although this is a second-hand tale from an interview, it does show that people still associate some disabilities with the sideshow and the exhibition of curiosities.23 16 Autumn 2013 In addition to the live sideshows of Coney Island and hibits that are based on von Hagen’s original work. While Venice Beach and the new program Freakshow on the cable these are arguably more scientifically educational than the network AMC, many television programs take on the circus freakshows of the past, the exhibitions do exploit the bodies midway sideshow. As technologies and interests grow and of human beings, just as sideshows did throughout the ninechange, perhaps this is simply the next evolution in the preteenth and early twentieth centuries. sentation of the other for entertainment at home. Perhaps In modern museums, even without these bodies exhibits, today society is more comfortable watching, asking questhere are rarely traces of images or displays of people with tions, and gawking at the different people with disabilities or disabilities in regular permanent exhibits or art. Annie Delin different proclivities than they would be in a public forum. explains that this absence reinforces cultural stereotypes The exploitation of disability in the modern world continagainst people with disabilities and conspires to “present a ues in many ways. While some programs on television may narrow perspective of the existence of disability in history.” appear to recognize the humanity of people with disabilities, Museums that exclude people with disabilities from exhibits, the pointing and staring aspects seem to still pervade sociwhether they are exhibits themselves as in the past sideshows ety; the sensational promotional commercials may be the and dime museums or represented in general exhibits, the only view that a person has of the people museum is discounting an entire segment of portrayed on any of the shows mentioned visitor population. In most history museabove. If that is the case, those people ums there are not images of people living, may only see the characters as freaks working, making art, or anything else in The question of without humanity.24 the past; if they are present they are called marvels of nature.26 how museums can Delin goes on to argue that when combat this imagery people with disabilities are shown in of exploitation and museums, many times they appear only entertainment can as freaks or beggars. Portraying people Some of the most popular and mostas freaks takes away their humanity; even be answered through visited museums are a part of the Ripley’s in museums this makes it acceptable to effective educational Believe It or Not Odditorium franchise. point and stare at people who are differprograms, universal These “museums” are sometimes still ent. Delin states that this makes it posbilled as odditoriums, and though they design, and the sible for ridicule and dehumanizing to do not contain living people in their extake place in the museum.27 welcoming of the hibits, wax and plastic figures of people entire public to who were considered to be freaks are museums. still on display. Most items in the museums are reproductions or gaffes (such The question of how museums can as the famous Barnum hoax the Feegee combat this imagery of exploitation and Mermaid). The Ripley’s franchise of entertainment can be answered through museums and exhibits is arguably for entereffective educational programs, universal detainment, not education, much like the original sideshows sign, and the welcoming of the entire public to museums. and dime museums of the past. The modern Ripley’s franRather than displaying those with disabilities as exhibits, chise includes the odditoriums or museums, perhaps the museums should strive to tell everyone’s story, include those most recognizable of their brand, as well as aquariums, miniwith disabilities in the exhibit materials itself, and offer golf, haunted adventures, and mirror mazes, to name a few. equitable experiences to all populations. Many museums Even today people are still interested in seeing the macaare making great strides in these directions, though hisbre, taboo, or different in so-called respectable museums, toric structures pose a myriad of challenges to overcome. even as they were in the past centuries. Today exhibits The Jewish Museum in Manhattan, Museum of Modern that display human bodies are popular in several regions. Art, Smithsonian, the New York Transit Museum, and Gunther von Hagen’s Body Worlds, a German exhibit aimed many children’s museums have great models of accessibilat exhibiting human anatomy, opened in 1996 and continues ity programs and universal design. The time for historic to travel in various forms around the world. In this exhibit sites, houses, and museums of all shapes and sizes to raise there are more than 200 specimens, and 26 whole human standards in these areas is now, and the opportunities are bodies that have been prepared and posed in diverse poses. endless. Though many of the bodies may have been obtained illegalThere are still several obstacles for educators and adly or at the least unethically, the press reports on the exhibit, ministrators to create inclusive museums and historic sites. even those that were negative, served only to increase the Historic sites have many specific difficulties because they are number of visitors to museums.25 tangibly inaccessible to many people with physical or mulThe success of Body Worlds is apparent in the number of tiple disabilities. The inclusion of people with disabilities in exhibits that imitate the original exhibition: Bodies…The exhibits or interpretation is still an area that many museums Exhibition, The Amazing Human Body, Body Exploration, and and historic sites could address. Bodies Revealed, are just a few of the traveling popular ex- Lessons for Today’s Museums Lessons for the Field H i s t o r y n e ws 17 History institutions have changed exponentially throughout the years. Public Firsthand historians today have the opportunity to experiences can enlarge and enhance museum audiences by creating effective, dynamic environments help students and programs. Simply inviting groups of make those people with special needs or disabilities connections that to a historic site is not enough. Once the make history and group is at the site, public historians must use their skills of engagement and shared people from the authority to help then teach social and life past matter to skills as well as educational. Our organizathem. tions also offer the unique opportunity, in many cases, for students to see the historic structures and artifacts that people actually lived in or used in the past that they usually see through history books. Firsthand experiences can help students make those connections that make history and people from the past matter to them. Though it is rare to find a freakshow today, especially one that displays people with disabilities, it is important for museum professionals to understand that those exhibitions are considered close cousins to modern exhibits and museums. Historic sites and museums are such great places to build community and connections with humanity from the past and today; it would be a shame to continue to exclude the ideas and participation of those who some consider to be different. By understanding the past, museum professionals can be more cognizant of their actions and efforts of inclusion. t Katie Stringer graduated in May 2013 with a Ph.D. in Public History (with a concentration in museum management) from Middle Tennessee State University. She is Executive Director of the Blount Mansion in Knoxville, Tennessee. In 2014, Rowman & Littlefield will publish her first book, Programming for People with Special Needs: A Guide for Museums and Historic Sites as part of its AASLH book series. She can be reached at [email protected]. Bibliography These sources are very helpful for museums to create inclusive and accessible exhibitions and spaces. The literature is still developing, but these sources are a wonderful start. Majewski, Janice. Part of Your General Public Is Disabled: A Handbook for Guides in Museums, Zoos, and Historic Houses. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987. Playforth, Sarah. Resource Disability Portfolio Series. London: Council for Museums, Archives & Libraries, 2003. Sandell, Richard. Museums, Society, Inequality (Museum Meanings). London: Routledge, 2002. Sandell, Richard, Jocelyn Dodd, and Rosemarie GarlandThomson. Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum. London: Routledge, 2010. Sherman, Daniel J. Museums and Difference. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008. 1 Robert Bogdan. Freakshow: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 25. 18 Autumn 2013 2 Phineas T. Barnum, An Illustrated Catalogue and Guide Book to Barnum’s American Museum (New York: Wynkoop, Hallenbeck, & Thomas, circa 1860). 3 Geoffrey Lewis, “The Role of Museums and the Professional Code of Ethics,” in Running a Museum: A Practical Handbook, ed. International Council of Museums. Paris: ICOM, 2010, 2; Hugh H. Genoways and Mary Anne Andrei, Museum Origins: Readings in Early Museum History and Philosophy (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008), 19, 21. 4 “Disastrous Fire: Total Destruction of Barnum’s American Museum,” New York Times, 14 July 1865; “Barnum’s New Museum Project: Museum Will Contain,” New York Times, 18 July 1865. 5 Edwin L. Godkin, “A Word About Museums,” The Nation (27 July 1865): 113-14. 6 “Burning of Barnum’s Museum: List of Losses and Insurances,” New York Times, 4 March 1868. 7 People with physical disabilities or anomalies are generally called “born different” peoples, unlike those who are “made freaks” by swallowing swords or nailing objects into their heads. Today’s freakshows consist mainly of people who are “made freaks” who do dangerous tricks or have a rare talents, though there are some instances of “born differents” still today; See Godkin, 113-14. 8 Andrea Stulman Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 5, 7; More information about the rise and impact of dime museums and entertainment industry as a whole is available in Dennett’s Weird and Wonderful; John Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century; Genoways and Andrei, Museum Origins; Charles C. Sellers, Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Wilson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art; and Gary Kulik, “Designing the Past: History-Museum Exhibitions from Peale to the Present,” in History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, Warren Leon and Roy Rosenweig, eds., 3-37. 9 Bogdan, 6. Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 10. 10 11 Bogdan, 121. 12 Ibid., 129, 130. “Sideshow Freaks a Vanishing Act,” Bangor (Maine) Daily News, 26 August 1985; Bogdan, 2. 13 14 Arlene Mayerson, “The History of the ADA: A Movement Perspective,” Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, 1992. 15 Elizabeth Stephens, “Twenty-First Century Freakshow: Recent Transformations in the Exhibition of Non-Normative Bodies,” Disability Quarterly Studies 25 (Summer 2005): 1. 16 AMC Network Entertainment, Freakshow, www.amctv.com/shows/freakshow. Dr. Jeffery Birnbaum, interview by author, Coney Island, NY, 10 May 2012. Interview summary available online at: http://on.aaslh.org/Stringer-Birnbaum. 17 18 Coney Island U.S.A., “Coney Island Circus Sideshow,” www.coneyisland. com/sideshow. 19 The National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) describes phocomalia as “a rare birth defect that causes severe birth defects, especially of the upper limbs. The bones of the arms, and in some cases other appendages, may be extremely shortened and even absent. The fingers of the hands may be fused. An extreme case results in the absence of the upper bones of both the arms and legs so that the hands and feet appear attached directly to the body.” See http://on.aaslh. org/phocomalia. In sideshows and freakshows, people with phocomalia are called “seal boys” or “lobster children” because of the physical characteristics of their disorder; Birnbaum interview. 20 Jason Black, email interview by author, 28 August 2012. Summary online at http://on.aaslh.org/StringerBlackScorpion; Organization for Rare Disorders, “Rare Disease Information,” http://on.aaslh.org/RareDiseaseInfo. 21 Black interview. 22 Birnbaum interview. Coney Island does not employ those with intellectual disability as performers, however, it is interesting to note that radio host Howard Stern has employed a person with microcephaly and severe intellectual disability. Lester Green, called Beetlejuice, attends functions and performances with Stern and is generally seen as a comedic entertainer; Birnbaum interview. 23 24 The question of exploitation in the modern world is addressed by Annie Delin, who states, in reference to exhibits and portrayals, “In modern society, we no longer actively condone the showing of ‘different’ people as freaks.… Yet we do perpetuate the acceptability of staring and pointing whenever we allow a picture of a small person or someone with a disfiguring condition to be displayed without identity and context.” From Annie Delin, “Buried in the Footnotes: The Absence of Disabled People in the Collective Imagery of Our Past,” in Museums, Society, and Inequality, edited by Richard Sandell (New York: Routledge, 2002), 89. 25 Peter M. McIsaac, “Gunther von Hagen’s Body Worlds: Exhibitionary Practice, German History, and Difference” by in Museums and Difference edited by Daniel J. Sherman (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 153, 160. 26 Delin, 84-85. 27 Ibid., 86, 89