Freak Shows History

The history and significance of American freak shows as a whole are topics that are rarely covered by modern historians. Many scholars find them distasteful and uninteresting. The times that they are mentioned in books, they are briefly mentioned as a form of American entertainment sectioned off for the unintelligent, the drab, and the poor. For the most part, this is a correct observation. Throughout most of its heyday, freak shows appealed to lower class citizens, and were an easy selling point for showmen. However, the reasons for both the initial rise in popularity and the reasons for decline are far more interesting. While the vast majority of history of freak shows are explained by showmen and managers needing a quick way to keep their

Ten-in-one shows and pitshows were added to carnivals, circuses, and amusement parks almost as a rule. These shows were never meant to be the main attraction, indeed, many showmen and managers voiced their negative feelings toward freak shows, thinking they were too superficial a form of entertainment. However, they drew in crowds, and since you could bill a person per show, they were surprisingly lucrative. This is well documented in the Coney Island Dreamland Sideshow, which had freaks from 1880 to well into the 20th century. In its prime, it would have over thirty thousand people take the twenty minute tour a day (Bogdan

The first is the theory of polygenism. Around the turn of the 18th century, a heated debate polarized America, and was searching for the answer to human origin. On one side, it was argued that physical differences between races was a result of a difference in climate; it was believed that darker skin tone was a result of more sunlight (Bogdan 38). On the other end, polygenists argued that every race has a separate origin story, effectively trying to prove that every race was a different species. This belief was unfortunately a widely used and effective argument for the continued enslavement of Africans (One). Human oddities, especially ones of differing races, were used as evidence for both sides of the argument. One interesting case was a man named Henry Moss. A black man from the South, Moss was marked with pale splotches throughout his body. Monogenists saw this change in skin complexion as evidence that all humans arise from the same base origin. If Africans had black skin as a result of their climate, they asserted that Moss’ skin color was changing as his body acclimated to the more temperate climate in America (Stanton 5-6). Polygenists thought that the blackness of Africans was a form of leprosy, and that Moss was undergoing a sudden cure (Bogdan 38). Moss is just one of many examples of human oddities being used for this purpose and similar