Word: 1840s
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American museums in the 1840s were not like their sophisticated counterparts in Paris or London. They did not exhibit fine works of art and science. Instead they featured stuffed birds and animals, mammoth bones and skeletons, along with the portraits of famous Americans. Europeans who visited were appalled by the poor taste of the American public, much as they are now reacting to the phenomenon of Court TV. The American public, however, reveled in its entertainment. As Professor Neil Harris explains in his biography of Barnum, American society was extremely puritanical and viewed the theater with antipathy. It infected their...
Kimball's mermaid proved to be another huge success for Barnum. In the 1840s, Barnum apparently stumbled upon the mermaid. In reality, Barnum worked for weeks to prepare his New York audience for the arrival of the creature...
Barnum brought the feejee mermaid to Charlestonin the 1840s, and played right into the hands ofNott and his contemporaries. Nott used themermaid, and many of Barnum's other oddities, toshow that the human species can diverge. Themermaid, which he professed to be genuine, provedthat this half-human was of a different species,as were the different races. The mermaid wascaught up in the intense debate over the unity ofthe human species...
...McCarthy brought out Blood Meridian, an apocalyptic epic, his Moby Dick, about a scalp hunter in the 1840s; to read it is to say goodbye to peace. Few did read it. McCarthy continued to live close to the bone in El Paso, a close-to-the-bone kind of town, just across the Rio Grande from Juarez, Mexico. He golfed, shot pool, ate modest portions of simple food at a cafeteria nearby and at a clattery coffee shop, hung with a couple of lawyers, an artist, an academic and a Nobel-prizewinning physicist next door in New Mexico, saw some...
...social life. At 17, he enrolled at West Point where he studied military leadership with many other future generals of the Civil War, including both Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. With a number of his former classmates, Longstreet gained real battlefield experience in the Mexican War during the 1840s. As the Civil War broke out in 1861, Longstreet, like Lee and other Southern officers, recognized his primary allegiance to the South and resigned from the U.S. Army to join the Confederacy...