P.T. Barnum The immensely successful promoter and the founder of the circus in 1871, which he called, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” October 2016 Haylee Patton

His General Biography He was born on July 5, 1810 in Bethel, Connecticut. He did not have a formal education. The son of Philo and Irene Barnum. Died on April 7, 1891 in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Jobs Before the Hoaxes As a child, he sold snacks and homemade cherry rum to soldiers at local gatherings. At 12 years old, he made enough money to buy his own livestock. By the age of 21, he owned a general store, a small lottery, and his own newspaper called the “Herald of Freedom.”

The Hoaxes and The Museum In 1835, Mr. Barnum paid $1,000 for an old, blind slave named Joice Heth. She claimed to be 161 years old and a George Washington’s former nurse. He showed her off throughout the northeast and made up to $1,000 a week. After making the money, he made a rumor that that she was actually an automaton controlled by a ventriloquist. She never older than 80 years old. He bought Scudder’s American Museum in lower Manhattan on December 1841, renamed it to Barnum’s American Museum where he showed the “Feejee Mermaid” and 500,000 other exhibits.

The Start of the Circus In 1842, Barnum met Charles Sherwood Statton. A 4 year old who stood 25 inches and weighed 15 pounds. Barnum trained the boy to sing and dance, showing him off as “General Tom Thumb”, which he showed to the public and even to England’s Queen Victoria. He then met and promoted a Swedish opera singer, Jenny Lind. Making a $1,000 offer for each show in the U.S. and Canada, 150 shows in all. He made more than $500,000 at each concert. He also served two terms in the Connecticut Legislature and one term as mayor of Bridgeport.

Greatest Show on Earth Barnum closed down his American Museum after a fire in 1868, but he kept many performers and opened P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus in Brooklyn on April 10, 1871. Later in 1874, Barnum found a permanent home in York Hippodrome. He joined forces with James Bailey and James Hutchinson in 1881. Also that year, he met Jumbo the elephant from the Royal Zoological Society in London.

How Did This Change the World? This business of the intriguing shows and oddities added the fun and entertaining into the average life from that time. He filled the hole for weird and the occult in that Victorian times. By this, he is an agent of change to the modern times of the 1900s. The gave unemployable people with physical defects jobs. And if I had a chance to ask him a question, it would be when people turned their noses up at him, what drove him to keep trying?

Work Cited http://www.biography.com/people/pt-barnum-9199751#greatest-show-on- earth http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-p-t- barnum http://www.authentichistory.com/1865-1897/3-gilded/5- harrison/18900000_PT_Barnum_Commercial.html http://railsplitter.com/?page_id=3783