The Showman and the Slave

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.