In the mid-1800s a utopian movement to rehabilitate the insane resulted in a wave of publicly funded asylums - many of which became unexpected centers of cultural activity. This work prompts us to reflect on what our society can learn from a generation that urgently and creatively tried to solve the problem of mental illness.
In this story about one of the 19th century's most famous Americans, Benjamin Reiss uses P.T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the contours of race relations in the antebellum North. Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Heth was an elderly enslaved woman who was said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. Seizing upon the novelty, the newly emerging commercial press turned her act - and especially her death - into one of the first media spectacles in American history.
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