The Showman and the Slave

Know about the book -

The Showman and the Slave is written by Benjamin Reiss and published by Harvard University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0674042654 (ISBN 10) and 9780674042650 (ISBN 13).

Reiss uses P. T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the race relations in the antebellum North. Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Heth was an enslaved woman said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. The newly emerging commercial press turned her act into one of the first media spectacles in American history.