| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Circus Age: Culture & Society under the American Big Top. By Janet M. Davis. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xx, 329 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2724-X. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5399-2.)

The Circus Age is the most significant scholarly book on circuses since Paul Bouissac's Circus & Culture (1976). Bouissac's analysis is semiotic, and his subject is the one-ring European circus; Janet M. Davis of the University of Texas has selected the uniquely American circus and uses theoretical underpinnings and historiographical approaches largely unmined twenty-five years ago. Specifically, Davis focuses on the largest of the railroad circuses at the turn of the century, considered the golden age of the American circus; there were ninety-eight circuses and menageries traveling the nation in 1903. She elucidates how the circus brought both much desired entertainment and a sense of modernity to far-flung parts of the nation. Davis is successful in demonstrating that "the railroad circus provides a vivid cultural window into this era's complex and volatile web of historical changes" (p. 10). Although Davis also includes railroad wild West shows in her analysis, she is quick to recognize the salient differences between a circus and a wild West exposition and actually minimizes the latter in her coverage.

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