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.

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Acknowledgments

Introduction The Circus World in the Golden Age

Part I: The Circus Migrant

Making Circus Day

Human and Animal Circus Workers and Their Knowledge Networks

Part II: The Circus Lot

Women's Work and Gendered Circus Labor in the Tented Shows

Animal Motherhood and (Re)Constructed Circus Families

Captive, Coerced, and Frontline Sideshow Workers

Part III: The Circus World from the Outside

The Circus as Big Business

The Making of the Circus Celebrity

Organized Circus Labor and Working-Class Audiences

Conclusion Circus Afterlives

Notes

Index

|"Ringer's approach to circus history centering the labor of transnational adults, children, and animals is both entirely original and deeply important. Circus World points the way to a new and more expansive kind of labor history."—Jeremy Zallen, author of American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light 1750–1865
|Andrea Ringer is an assistant professor of history at Tennessee State University.