Barnum's American Museum

P.T. Barnum founded Barnum's American Museum in New York City in 1841. It is historically significant for its combination of highbrow and lowbrow attractions, which influenced later public institutions in the United States. Exhibits included live animals, scientific (and pseudoscientific) specimens, historical artifacts, human oddities, lectures, and theatrical productions. According to the Lost Museum's website, "Amid the burgeoning and splintering cultural marketplace of the era, Barnum’s American Museum stood out as archetypal, an institution that transcended difference in breadth and size of the audience it drew and also exploited difference in its exhibits in order to attract that audience. In short, in the view of recent scholarship, Barnum’s American Museum epitomized its era."



A brief search for documents containing "Barnum's American Museum" and "Walt Whitman" yielded the subjects of phrenology and temperance. Thomas David Lisk claims that "phrenology, the science of interpreting the skull, played an important role in Walt Whitman's life." Thomas Augst notes that "within the broad history of temperance reform, and perhaps at the center of it, a simple story about the drunkard's becoming sober turned the domestic lives of ordinary men into a new kind of public spectacle purveyed by temperance societies, fiction, drama, and the lecture hall. Recently scholars have interpreted the cultural implications of this story, reading literary texts such as Walt Whitman's Franklin Evans (1842) or T.S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There (1854) in particular as evidence of developing ideologies of class and gender that animated antebellum reform."

Works Consulted:

 Augst, Thomas. "Temperance, Mass Culture, and the Romance of Experience." Oxford University Press. American Literary History, Vol.19, No.2 (Summer 2007). pp.297-323. http://0-www.jstor.org.opac.sfsu.edu/stable/4496982

Lisk, Thomas David. "Walt Whitman's Attic." The Massachussetts Review, Vol.47, No.1 (Spring 2006) pp.154-67. http://0-www.jstor.org.opac.sfsu.edu/stable/25091068

http://chnm.gmu.edu/lostmuseum/lm/163/