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| Book Review | Thomas M. Spencer | Hip Cultural Analysis Ð Light on Jargon | Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 3.1 | The History Cooperative
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January, 2004
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Book Review

Hip Cultural Analysis Ð Light on Jargon

Thomas M. Spencer
Northwest Missouri State University

Davis, Janet M. The Circus Age: Culture & Society Under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xvii + 329 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index, $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5399-2.

     The traveling railroad circus of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certainly is a fascinating topic for a book. Much work on this era argues that cultural performances, such as parades or pageants, were as much reflections as they were products of the new industrial culture. Janet M. Davis' The Circus Age reaches a similar conclusion about the circus. Davis, whose exhaustive research for this book is impressive, contends that the circus is a powerful cultural form that helped to shape the nation's identity as an industrial society and world power. Davis contends that the circus "provides a cultural window into this era's complex and volatile web of historical changes" and that the circus was "a powerful cultural icon of a new, modern nation-state." She maintains that the circus was a historical and cultural process all to itself and that there were multiple "performances" taking place under the big top that are worthy of examination. . . .

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