From the 1870s to the 1960s, circuses crisscrossed the nation providing entertainment. A unique workforce of human and animal laborers from around the world put on the show. They also formed the backbone of a tented entertainment industry that raised new questions about what constituted work and who counted as a worker.

Andrea Ringer examines the industry-wide circus world--the collection of shows that traveled by rail, wagon, steamboat, and car--and the traditional and nontraditional laborers who created it. Performers and their onstage labor played an integral part in the popularity of the circus. But behind the scenes, other laborers performed the endless menial tasks that kept the show on the road. Circus operators regulated employee behavior both inside and outside the tent even as the employees themselves blurred the line between leisure and labor until, in all parts of the show, the workers could not escape their work.

Illuminating and vivid, Circus World delves into the gender, class, and even species concerns within an extinct way of life.

Andrea Ringer is an assistant professor of history at Tennessee State University.

Acknowledgments

Introduction  The Circus World in the Golden Age

Part I: The Circus Migrant

1. Making Circus Day
2. Human and Animal Circus Workers and Their Knowledge Networks

Part II: The Circus Lot

1. Women’s Work and Gendered Circus Labor in the Tented Shows
2. Animal Motherhood and (Re)Constructed Circus Families
3. Captive, Coerced, and Frontline Sideshow Workers

Part III: The Circus World from the Outside

1. The Circus as Big Business
2. The Making of the Circus Celebrity
3. Organized Circus Labor and Working-Class Audiences

Conclusion    Circus Afterlives

Notes

Index