Education: Lesson Details
Overview
Though a large majority of Americans with disabilities were hidden from view in the nineteenth century, a few led very public lives. This lesson examines the intersection of disability and celebrity during the decades prior to Helen Keller's rise to fame.
Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the "freak show" was at center of American commercial amusements, and people like Charles Stratton, better known as General Tom Thumb, were among the best known entertainers. Promoted by entrepreneurs like P.T. Barnum, large paying audiences viewed people with what today would be considered disabilities. The artifacts provided in this lesson can be used to bring the various meanings of disability in American life. For people with disabilities, these meanings had both positive and negative implications.
Questions To Consider
1.) What advertising techniques did P.T. Barnum employ in promoting Tom Thumb? What was the public culture in which Barnum and Charles Stratton flourished? And why was physical difference apparently such a popular obsession?
2.) What kinds of lives did people like Charles Stratton, Lavinia Warren, Blind Tom, the man behind the "What Is It?" act, and the Aztec Twins lead? Did some have more personal control over their lives than others? Why? What alternatives did these individuals have?
3.) What do the readings reveal about the connections between disability and race in the United States of the 1800s?
4.) What does the article, "Circus And Museum Freaks -- Curiosities Of Pathology," suggest about what would happen to these acts in the twentieth century? Was this development positive or negative?