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4 books match the query 'Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows'
Big Top Boss
JOHN RINGLING NORTH AND THE CIRCUSDavid Lewis Hammarstrom
University of Illinois Press, 1992
king John Ringling North explored the remarkable career of the man who ran Ringling
Bros. and Barnum & Baily for thirty years. David Lewis Hammarstrom details
how North guided the circus through adversities ranging from depressions and
wars to crippling labor strikes and rapidly changing trends in American entertainment.
Hammarstrom interviewed a host of circus figures including North himself; his
formers, directors, and department heads who were involved with the circus when
North owned and operated it.
E Pluribus Barnum
The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular CultureBluford Adams
University of Minnesota Press, 1997
The first book to consider the career of P. T. Barnum from a cultural studies perspective.
Phineas Taylor Barnum lived from 1810 until 1891, and in the eighty-one years of his life he created show business as we know it. In E Pluribus Barnum, Bluford Adams investigates the influence Barnum had on American popular culture of the nineteenth century, and expands our understanding of the ways he continues to influence us today.
Beginning with a discussion of Barnum’s early shows, Adams demonstrates the dynamic interplay between Barnum’s increasingly “respectable” aspirations for his entertainments and his active cultivation of middle-class sensibilities in his audiences. In his discussion of the 1850-51 concert tour of the “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, Adams explores the role played by women’s rights and class issues in Barnum’s management of these concerts. Barnum’s American Museum and the “moral dramas” presented in its theater (which included a play of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) are examined in the context of debates about slavery and temperance. The later circuses are discussed in terms of their international pageants and their staging of orientalism through racial exhibitions. Adams relates the rise of Barnum to the emergence of a new U.S. society, one riven by conflicts over slavery, feminism, immigration, and capitalism. He documents Barnum’s efforts to negotiate those conflicts by steadily remaking his amusements and his public image. E Pluribus Barnum examines Barnum’s shifting political allegiances for what they tell us about American culture at the time, examines the audiences he created, and considers his career as a crucial moment in the ongoing struggle over the politics of U.S. commercial entertainments.
Ringlingville USA
The Stupendous Story of Seven Siblings and Their Stunning Circus SuccessJerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2004
The Ringling Brothers began their business under the most modest of circumstances and through hard work, business savvy, and some luck created the largest, most famous circus in the world. They became wealthy men, one 50 cent admission ticket at a time.
Ringlingville USA chronicles the brothers' journey from immigrant poverty to enduring glory as the kings of the circus world. The Ringlings and their circus were last studied in depth over four decades ago. Now, for the first time, the brothers' detailed financial records and personal correspondence are available to researchers. Jerry Apps weaves together that information with newspaper accounts, oral histories, colorful anecdotes, and stunning circus ephemera and photos, many never before been published, to illuminate the importance of the Ringlings' accomplishments. He describes how the Ringling Brothers confronted the challenges of taxation, war, economic pressure, changing technology, and personal sorrows to find their place in history. The brothers emerge as complex characters whose ambition, imagination, and pure hucksterism fueled the phenomenon that was the Ringling Brothers' Circus.
Tents, Tigers and the Ringling Brothers
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2007