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Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History

Author : Yunte Huang
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
Release Date : 2018-04-03
ISBN : 163149385X
Pages : 416 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (493 Download)

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Download Free Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History PDF by Yunte Huang Full Book and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist (Biography) New York Times Critics’ Best of the Year One of NPR's Great Reads of 2018 A Newsweek Best Nonfiction Book of the Year With wry humor, Shakespearean profundity, and trenchant insight, Yunte Huang brings to life the story of America’s most famous nineteenth-century Siamese twins. Nearly a decade after his triumphant Charlie Chan biography, Yunte Huang returns with this long-awaited portrait of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874), twins conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, who were “discovered” in Siam by a British merchant in 1824. Bringing an Asian American perspective to this almost implausible story, Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy showmen who gained their freedom and traveled the backroads of rural America to bring “entertainment” to the Jacksonian mobs. Their rise from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not just another sensational biography but a Hawthorne-like excavation of America’s historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal, for tyrannizing the “other”—a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.

The Wonders

Author : John Woolf
Publisher : Michael O'Mara Books
Release Date : 2019-05-02
ISBN : 1789290368
Pages : pages
Rating : 4.9/5 (29 Download)

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Download Free The Wonders PDF by John Woolf Full Book and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A promising young historian with a taste for the exotic.' Stephen Fry The Wonders is a radical new history of the Victorian age: meet the forgotten and extraordinary freak performers whose talents and disabilities helped define an era. On 23 March, 1844, General Tom Thumb, at 25 inches tall, entered the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace and bowed low to Queen Victoria. On both sides of the Atlantic, this meeting marked a tipping point in the nineteenth century - the age of the freak was born. Bewitching all levels of society, it was a world of astonishing spectacle - of dwarfs, giants, bearded ladies, Siamese twins and swaggering showmen - and one that has since inspired countless novels, films and musicals. But the real stories (human dramas that so often eclipsed the fantasy presented on the stage), of the performing men, women and children, have been forgotten or marginalized in the histories of the very people who exploited them. In this richly evocative account, Dr John Woolf uses a wealth of recently discovered material to bring to life the sometimes tragic, sometimes triumphant, always extraordinary stories of people who used their (dis)abilities and difference to become some of the first international celebrities. And through their lives we discover afresh some of the great transformations of the age: the birth of showbusiness, of celebrity, of advertising, of 'alternative facts'; while also exploring the tensions between the power of fame, the impact of exploitation and our fascination with 'otherness'.

Freak Show Legacies

Author : Gary S. Cross
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date : 2021-05-06
ISBN : 1350145149
Pages : 248 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (145 Download)

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Download Free Freak Show Legacies PDF by Gary S. Cross Full Book and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Society has long been fascinated with the freakish, shocking and strange. In this book Gary Cross shows how freakish elements have been embedded in modern popular culture over the course of the 20th century despite the evident disenchantment with this once widespread cultural outlet. Exploring how the spectacle of freakishness conflicted with genteel culture, he shows how the condemnation of the freak show by middle-class America led to a transformation and merging of genteel and freak culture through the cute, the camp and the creepy. Though the carnival and circus freak was marginalised by the 1960s and had largely disappeared by the 1980s, forms of freakish culture survived and today appear in reality TV, horror movies, dark comedies and the popularity of tattoos. Freak Show Legacies will focus less on the individual 'freak' as 'the other' in society, and more on the audience for the freakish and the transformation of wonder, sensibility and sensitivity that this phenomenon entailed. It will use the phenomenon of 'the freak' to understand the transformation of American popular culture across the 20th century, identify elements of 'the freak' in popular culture both past and present, and ask how it has prevailed despite its apparent unpopularity.

Mobituaries

Author : Mo Rocca
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Release Date : 2021-11-02
ISBN : 1501197630
Pages : 384 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (197 Download)

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Download Free Mobituaries PDF by Mo Rocca Full Book and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From popular TV correspondent and writer Rocca comes a charmingly irreverent and rigorously researched book that celebrates the dead people who made life worth living.

Hold On

Author : Peter Toohey
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Release Date : 2020-05-12
ISBN : 0190083638
Pages : 224 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (83 Download)

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Download Free Hold On PDF by Peter Toohey Full Book and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do you do when you're not asleep and when you're not eating? You're most likely waiting--to finish work, to get home, or maybe even to be seen by your doctor. Hold On is less about how to manage all that "staying where one is until a particular time or event" (OED) than it is about describing how we experience waiting. Waiting can embrace things like hesitation and curiosity, dithering and procrastination, hunting and being hunted, fearing and being feared, dread and illness, courting and parenting, anticipation and excitement, curiosity, listening to and even performing music, being religious, being happy or unhappy, being bored and being boring. They're all explored here. Waiting is also characterized by brain chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine. They can radically alter the way we register the passing of time. Waiting is also the experience that may characterize most interpersonal relations--mismanage it at your own risk. Hold On contains advice on how to cope with waiting-how to live better-but its main aim is to show how important the experience of waiting is, in popular and highbrow culture, and, sometimes, in history. Detouring into psychology, neurology, ethology, philosophy, film, literature, and especially art, Peter Toohey's illuminates in unexpected ways one of the most common of human experiences. After reading his book, you'll never wait the same way again.

The Body in the Anglosphere, 1880–1920

Author : Robert W. Thurston
Publisher : Routledge
Release Date : 2021-12-31
ISBN : 1000520684
Pages : 360 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (52 Download)

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Download Free The Body in the Anglosphere, 1880–1920 PDF by Robert W. Thurston Full Book and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the body in every chapter, this book examines the changing meanings and profound significance of the physical form among the Anglo-Saxons from 1880 to 1920. They formed an imaginary—but, in many ways, quite real—community that ruled much of the world. Among them, racism became more virulent. To probe the importance of the body, this book brings together for the first time the many areas in which the physical form was newly or more extensively featured, from photography through literature, frontier wars, violent sports, and the global circus. Sex, sexuality, concepts of gender including women’s possibilities in all areas of life, and the meanings of race and of civilization figured regularly in Anglo discussions. Black people challenged racism by presenting their own photos of respectable folk. As all this unfolded, Anglo men and women faced the problem of maintaining civilized control vs. the need to express uninhibited feeling. With these issues in mind, it is evident that the origins of today’s debates about race and gender lie in the late nineteenth century.

The Chinese Lady

Author : Nancy E. Davis
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Release Date : 2019-06-04
ISBN : 0190645253
Pages : 296 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (645 Download)

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Download Free The Chinese Lady PDF by Nancy E. Davis Full Book and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1834, a young Chinese woman named Afong Moy arrived in America, her bound feet stepping ashore in New York City. She was both a prized guest and advertisement for a merchant firm--a promotional curiosity used to peddle exotic wares from the East. Over the next few years, she would shape Americans' impressions of China even as she assisted her merchant sponsors in selling the largest quantities of Chinese goods yet imported for the burgeoning American market. Americans views of the exotic Far East in this early period before Chinese immigration were less critical than they would later become. Afong Moy became a subject of poetry, a trendsetter for hair styles and new fashions, and a lucky name for winning racehorses. She met Americans face to face in cities and towns across the country, appearing on local stages to sell and to entertain. Yet she also moved in high society, and was the first Chinese guest to be welcomed to the White House. However, this success was not to last. As her novelty wore off, Afong Moy was cast aside by her managers. Though concerned public citizens rallied in support, her fame dwindled and she spent several years in a New Jersey almshouse. In the late 1840s, P.T. Barnum offered Afong Moy several years of promising renewal as the compatriot of Tom Thumb, yet this stint too was short-lived. In this first biography, Nancy E. Davis sheds light on the mystery of Afong Moy's life as a Chinese woman living in a foreign land.

Entertainment Nation

Author : NMAH
Publisher : Smithsonian Institution
Release Date : 2022-11-01
ISBN : 1588347249
Pages : 545 pages
Rating : 4.8/5 (347 Download)

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Download Free Entertainment Nation PDF by NMAH Full Book and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: US history gets the star treatment with this essential guide to the Smithsonian's first permanent exhibition on pop culture, featuring objects like Muhammad Ali’s training robe, and Leonard Nimoy’s Spock ears, and Dorothy’s ruby slippers, oh my! Entertainment Nation is a star-studded and richly illustrated book celebrating the best of 150 years of US pop culture. The book presents nearly 300 breathtaking Smithsonian objects from the first long-term exhibition on popular culture, and features contributors like Billie Jean King, Ali Wong, and Jill Lepore. Entertainment Nation offers the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, the passion and grit of star athletes, the limelight of the music industry and theater, and the amazing entertainers we love to watch, with dazzling cultural touchstones like: Music and Theater Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton costume John Coltrane’s saxophone Selena's leather outfit Film and Television Captain America’s shield Mr. Roger’s sweater Seinfeld’s puffy shirt Sports Mia Hamm’s Olympic jersey Kristi Yamaguchi’s ice skates Babe Ruth autographed baseball The book includes essays that contextualize the objects’ place in time and history, exploring how entertainment sparks conversation and debate, reveals social tensions and political power, and dictates who gets to be the hero or the villain. Taking a nostalgic look at old favorites and an exhilarating glimpse of contemporary attractions, Entertainment Nation is a love letter to pop culture.

Wonders and Rarities

Author : Travis Zadeh
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Release Date : 2023-01-10
ISBN : 0674287649
Pages : 465 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (287 Download)

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Download Free Wonders and Rarities PDF by Travis Zadeh Full Book and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The wonders and curiosities of the Islamic imagination await discovery by a new generation of readers in this superb and very enjoyable book by Travis Zadeh.” —Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature The astonishing biography of one of the world’s most influential books. During the thirteenth century, the Persian naturalist and judge Zakariyyāʾ Qazwīnī authored what became one of the most influential works of natural history in the world: Wonders and Rarities. Exploring the dazzling movements of the stars above, the strange minutiae of the minerals beneath the earth, and everything in between, Qazwīnī offered a captivating account of the cosmos. With fine paintings and leading science, Wonders and Rarities inspired generations as it traveled through madrasas and courts, unveiling the magical powers of nature. Yet after circulating for centuries, first in Arabic and Persian, then in Turkish and Urdu, Qazwīnī’s compendium eventually came to stand as a strange, if beautiful, emblem of medieval ignorance. Restoring Qazwīnī to his place as a herald of the rare and astonishing, Travis Zadeh dramatically revises the place of wonder in the history of Islamic philosophy, science, and literature. From the Mongol conquests to the rise of European imperialism and Islamic reform, Zadeh shows, wonder provided an enduring way to conceive of the world—at once constituting an affective reaction, an aesthetic stance, a performance of piety, and a cognitive state. Yet through the course of colonial modernity, Qazwīnī’s universe of marvels helped advance the notion that Muslims lived in a timeless world of superstition and enchantment, unaware of the western hemisphere or the earth’s rotation around the sun. Recovering Qazwīnī’s ideas and his reception, Zadeh invites us into a forgotten world of thought, where wonder mastered the senses through the power of reason and the pleasure of contemplation.

Nine Nasty Words

Author : John McWhorter
Publisher : Penguin
Release Date : 2021-05-04
ISBN : 0593188802
Pages : 288 pages
Rating : 4.3/5 (188 Download)

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Download Free Nine Nasty Words PDF by John McWhorter Full Book and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller One of the preeminent linguists of our time examines the realms of language that are considered shocking and taboo in order to understand what imbues curse words with such power--and why we love them so much. Profanity has always been a deliciously vibrant part of our lexicon, an integral part of being human. In fact, our ability to curse comes from a different part of the brain than other parts of speech--the urgency with which we say "f&*k!" is instead related to the instinct that tells us to flee from danger. Language evolves with time, and so does what we consider profane or unspeakable. Nine Nasty Words is a rollicking examination of profanity, explored from every angle: historical, sociological, political, linguistic. In a particularly coarse moment, when the public discourse is shaped in part by once-shocking words, nothing could be timelier.

The North Carolina Historical Review

Author :
Publisher :
Release Date : 2019
ISBN :
Pages : 520 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (822 Download)

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Download Free The North Carolina Historical Review PDF by Full Book and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: