The Sideshow Lexicon
AB (Amusement Business) – The magazine of the trade. In the old days, before its name change, it was The Billboard. Many, if not the majority, of traveling showmen would
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Freak Shows
Since Antiquity, visually unusual beings have been exhibited in public spaces. In parts of southern Europe there was formerly plied a nefarious trade in maiming and mutilating young children for the purpose of producing distressing deformities to excite pity and thus induce alms. An instance of such mutilation is made romantic use of by Victor Hugo in his story L’Homme qui rit.
Later freak shows featuring a number of ‘monsters’ contributed to the success of travelling shows. For more than a hundred years, the sideshow was to become an indispensable appendage of American circus culture.
The first one of its kind systematically organized was contained in P.T. Barnum’s Great Travelling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome and the countless imitations which followed in its wake habitually featured the same classic attractions, including the giant, the fat lady, the midget, the three-legged boy, the armless wonder and the thin man.
Barnum Stories
The white whales or the monstrous couple At his beginning, Barnum traveled extensively across the country and even the world to search for curiosities. One day he traveled up the
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Freakshows Today
In the early 1990s former phone salesman Jim Rose developed a modern sideshow called “the Jim Rose Circus”, reinventing the sideshow with two types of acts that would attract modern
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History of sideshows
Exhibitions of living human oddities has been around in travelling fairs, circuses and taverns in England since the 1600s. These included so-called giants, dwarves, fat people, the very thin, conjoined
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Types of freakshows
The Ten-in-One freakshow offers a program of ten sequential acts under one tent for a single admission price. The ten-in-one might be partly a freak show exhibiting "human oddities" (including
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Exploiters or slaves ?
As stated earlier, many freaks signed their contracts and displayed themselves willfully, while others were sold or drafted by their parents or guardians into the freak show. Those who had
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What is a freakshow
A Freak Show is a show where human oddities and freakish working acts are performed. The term applies to both circus and carnival. In practice, these shows were often ten-in-one
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