E Pluribus Barnum

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.