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Essay on Sources
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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e s s a y o n s o u r c e s Primary Sources Although there is an abundance of historical evidence documenting circuses and animals in the United States, like many primary source bases, it offers great detail with respect to some favored topics, people, and practices while obscuring many of the workaday realities, experiences of people, and actions of animals that were equally crucial to what the circuses were. Specifically, the robust archival collections of circus history around the nation—and there are at least half a dozen—tend to contain abundant “circus paper,” that is, advertising materials in the form of broadsides, handbills, newspaper clippings, and souvenir or promotional photographs that tell us much about the public face of these businesses. Early-twentieth-century celebrity memoirs of circus life are even easier to locate in many libraries, and these expose different aspects of circus life, although always with a proindustry agenda. Less common are accounts by working-class circus people, candid behind-the-scenes photos (especially for the nineteenth century, before the birth of consumer photography), or business records documenting labor relations or the caste-system subcultures of the circuses. Nevertheless, several archival collections were crucial to this work, and I found that they held far more riches than I could possibly fit into this little book. The Joseph T. McCaddon Collection of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library is a unique archive documenting the late-nineteenth-century circus business, with its telegram receipts, loan and engagement contracts, personal photographs, and systematically compiled surveys of the press agent’s performance by way of day-by-day clippings of planted newspaper pieces assembled in scrapbooks. I also made happy use of the Leonidas Westervelt Circus Collection at the New-York Historical Society, which was particularly helpful for the early history of the animal trade, P. T. Barnum’s entry into the circus trade, elephant biographies, and fan newsletters. The small P. T. Barnum Collection of letters between Barnum and his agents, as well as press agent Townsend Walsh’s papers in the Rare Books Division of the New York Public Library, helped with an exploration of the “there’s no such thing as bad press” philosophy pioneered by P. T. Barnum and others with respect to animal exhibitions. Additionally, the Tibbals Digital Collection of circus advertising and broadsides, avail- 278 Essay on Sources able through the John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, emerged and expanded during the writing of this book to become the foremost online source for circus advertising art—and circus paper truly should be taken as a preeminent art form of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States. The Tibbals collection allows for surveys of advertising trends over decades that would be very difficult and potentially damaging to these fragile items if performed in person . Of course, the king of circus collections is housed at the Robert L. Parkinson Library and Research Center at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Although of somewhat limited use for this project because its business records emphasize twentieth-century circuses like Ringling Brothers, it probably holds every book every published on circuses, and it has a particularly dedicated staff. This project also benefited from a survey of circus and animal show materials in the Early American Imprints Series and the American Broadsides and Ephemera Series (both drawn from the American Antiquarian Society collections in Worcester, New York), which provide most of the early advertising supporting the first several chapters of this book. For the entire century, the Early American Newspapers and the American Periodical Series searchable online newspaper archives offer an overwhelming avalanche of independent news coverage and planted circus press notices. Taken in combination, these two forms—circus-authored pseudo news and local reporting on circuses—contain more information than any other source on the trade. In combination, they also draw our attention to the struggles of circus press men to control the messages the public received about elephant captivity, animal training, circus labor relations, and more. To get a sense for how elephants behaved and the ways circus people talked about elephants (as both blessing and curse in the business), I did exploit a number of celebrity-authored memoirs and exposés, which revealed the cultures of traveling shows, events in the lives of particular elephants, as well as the nature of animal acquisition , training, and disposition: P...