| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Janet M. Davis. The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. Pp. xviii, 329. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

By the end of the nineteenth century, American railroad circuses were extravaganzas. Central to the most celebrated was a gigantic, three-ring tent wherein performers flew through the air, walked the high wire, made animals do tricks, balanced on horseback, clowned, and accomplished other uncommon feats. Attached to the big top was a menagerie where patrons gawked at foreign animals. There was a midway where a side-show talker pitched passersby tales of dog-faced humans, wild men from Borneo, armless wonders, and sword swallowers. The railroad circus, with its glitzy displays of color, people, animals, and equipment, invaded towns, grabbed citizens' imaginations, and then left. Circus day was part and parcel of the culture but with its mock Oriental, African, and other non-American motifs, it was an exotic and, in retrospect, a bizarre intrusion into the hum-drum of everyday life. . . .

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