| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Big Tent: The Traveling Circus in Georgia, 1820–1930. By Gregory J. Renoff. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. xii, 235 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-2892-8.)

Until quite recently a scholarly study of the American circus was an oxymoron, with few serious investigations undertaken by professionally trained scholars. With the outstanding efforts of Janet Davis, David Carlyon, Fred Dahlinger Jr., William L. Slout, Stuart Thayer, Joy S. Kasson, and a few others (notably, the pioneering work of A. H. Saxon) this course has been altered with first-rate books on the circus appearing with some frequency. Even rarer than thoroughly researched, documented, and analyzed histories of the circus in general are those that focus on regional, state, or local American circus. A notable exception is Gregory J. Renoff's superb and revelatory examination of the circus in Georgia (and by extension the South), a study that takes its place among the best of circus histories.

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