Date of Graduation

5-2025

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Advisor(s)

Michele Prettyman

Second Advisor

Orit Avishai

Abstract

Rattling through American towns large and small during its heyday, the archetypal, three-ring railroad circus was a novel attraction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era, the circus was the dominant entertainment industry in the United States. Using both archival and historical research methods, my project offers an anatomy of the circus industry in America, both tracing its development and exploring its centrality to American culture and iconography. As a distinctly American institution, the growth of the industry was expressly linked to the physical expansion of the nation, which was simultaneously grappling with the abolition of slavery in 1865 and the rise of Jim Crow legal codes in 1870. With this being a particularly vulnerable historical moment for African Americans, I will present and examine the ways in which these contemporaneous phenomena are linked beyond time. My project analyzes popular circus attractions like the “sideshow” and “freak show,” as well as clowning, which dually reflected and constructed bestial and dehumanizing conceptions of Black people. Additionally, it examines certain attractions as counternarratives to Black success—attempts by white America to reassert its superiority over African Americans following the abolition of slavery. I argue that the railroad circus of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries acted as a seminal site of the dissemination of ideas about Black people, dually reflecting and constructing, measuring and prescribing, America’s perception of the African American identity by burlesquing Blackness under the big top.

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