Download or read book Inseparable The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History written by Yunte Huang and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An astonishing story, by turns ghastly, hilarious, unnerving, and moving.”—Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve In this “excellent” portrait of America’s famed nineteenth-century Siamese twins, celebrated biographer Yunte Huang discovers in the conjoined lives of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874) a trenchant “comment on the times in which we live” (Wall Street Journal). “Uncovering ironies, paradoxes and examples of how Chang and Eng subverted what Leslie Fiedler called ‘the tyranny of the normal’ ” (BBC), Huang depicts the twins’ implausible route to assimilation after their “discovery” in Siam by a British merchant in 1824 and arrival in Boston as sideshow curiosities in 1829. Their climb from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich, southern gentry who profited from entertaining the Jacksonian mobs; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not just another sensational biography but an “extraordinary” (New York Times), Hawthorne-like excavation of America’s historical penchant for tyrannizing the other—a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.
Download or read book The Lives of Chang and Eng written by Joseph Andrew Orser and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-11-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Connected at the chest by a band of flesh, Chang and Eng Bunker toured the United States and the world from the 1820s to the 1870s, placing themselves and their extraordinary bodies on exhibit as "freaks of nature" and "Oriental curiosities." More famously known as the Siamese twins, they eventually settled in rural North Carolina, married two white sisters, became slave owners, and fathered twenty-one children between them. Though the brothers constantly professed their normality, they occupied a strange space in nineteenth-century America. They spoke English, attended church, became American citizens, and backed the Confederacy during the Civil War. Yet in life and death, the brothers were seen by most Americans as "monstrosities," an affront they were unable to escape. Joseph Andrew Orser chronicles the twins' history, their sometimes raucous journey through antebellum America, their domestic lives in North Carolina, and what their fame revealed about the changing racial and cultural landscape of the United States. More than a biography of the twins, the result is a study of nineteenth-century American culture and society through the prism of Chang and Eng that reveals how Americans projected onto the twins their own hopes and fears.
Download or read book An Historical Account of the Siamese Twin Brothers from Actual Observations written by James W. Hale and published by . This book was released on 1829 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Catalogue of the Allen A Brown Collection of Books Relating to the Stage in the Public Library of the City of Boston written by Allen A. Brown Collection (Boston Public Library) and published by Boston : The Trustees. This book was released on 1919 with total page 976 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bibliotheca Lindesiana written by James Ludovic Lindsay Earl of Crawford and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 1572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Chang and Eng written by Darin Strauss and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-05-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stunning novel combines fiction with astonishing fact to tell the story of history’s most famous conjoined twins. Born in Siam in 1811—on a squalid houseboat on the Mekong River—Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities before the age of twenty. Touring the world’s stages as a circus act, they settled in the American South just prior to the Civil War. They eventually married two sisters from North Carolina, fathering twenty-one children between them, and lived for more than six decades never more than seven inches apart, attached at the chest by a small band of skin and cartilage. Woven from the fabric of fact, myth, and imagination, Strauss’s narrative gives poignant, articulate voice to these legendary brothers, and humanizes the freakish legend that grew up around them. Sweeping from the Far East and the court of the King of Siam to the shared intimacy of their lives in America, Chang and Eng rescues one of the nineteenth century’s most fabled human oddities from the sideshow of history, drawing from their extraordinary lives a novel of exceptional power and beauty.
Download or read book Authors and Subjects written by and published by . This book was released on 1880 with total page 1044 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal written by Waltraud Ernst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating volume tackles the history of the terms 'normal' and 'abnormal'. Originally meaning 'as occurring in nature', normality has taken on significant cultural gravitas and this book recognizes and explores that fact. The essays engage with the concepts of the normal and the abnormal from the perspectives of a variety of academic disciplines – ranging from art history to social history of medicine, literature, and science studies to sociology and cultural anthropology. The contributors use as their conceptual anchors the works of moral and political philosophers such as Canguilhem, Foucault and Hacking, as well as the ideas put forward by sociologists including Durkheim and Illich. With contributions from a range of scholars across differing disciplines, this book will have a broad appeal to students in many areas of history.
Download or read book Bibliotheca Americana written by Joseph Sabin and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Wonders written by John Woolf and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On March 23, 1844, General Tom Thumb, just 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, and the age of the freak was born.Bewitching all levels of society, it was a world of curiosities and astonishing spectacle—of dwarfs, giants, bearded ladies, Siamese twins, and swaggering showmen. 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, 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. Through their lives we discover afresh some of the great transformations of the age: the birth of show business, of celebrity, of advertising, and of “alternative facts” while also exploring the tensions between the power of fame, the impact of exploitation, and our fascination with “otherness.”
Download or read book Monster theory electronic resource written by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1996-11-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.
Download or read book Bibliotheca Osleriana written by Sir William Osler and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1969 with total page 836 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During his tenure as the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford from 1905-1919, Sir William Osler amassed a considerable library on the history of medicine and science. A Canadian native, Osler had studied at McGill University and decided to leave his collection of 7,600 items to its Faculty of Medicine. A catalogue, the Bibliotheca Osleriana, was compiled - a labour of love that took ten years to complete and involved W.W. Francis, R.H. Hill, and Archibald Malloch. Osler himself laid down the broad outlines of the catalogue and wrote many of the annotations.
Download or read book Bibliotheca Geographica Historica written by Henry Stevens (Jr.) and published by . This book was released on 1872 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore written by Anonymous and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2024-01-09 with total page 1150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.
Download or read book Index catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General s Office United States written by and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 1034 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bibliotheca Geographica Historica Or A Catalogue of a Nine Days Sale of Rare Valuable Ancient and Modern Books written by Henry Stevens and published by . This book was released on 1872 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Freak garde written by Robin Blyn and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1890s, American artists have employed the arts of the freak show to envision radically different ways of being. The result is a rich avant-garde tradition that critiques and challenges capitalism from within. The Freak-garde traces the arts of the freak show from P. T. Barnum to Matthew Barney and demonstrates how a form of mass culture entertainment became the basis for a distinctly American avant-garde tradition. Exploring a wide range of writers, filmmakers, photographers, and artists who have appropriated the arts of the freak show, Robin Blyn exposes the disturbing power of human curiosities and the desires they unleash. Through a series of incisive and often startling readings, Blyn reveals how such figures as Mark Twain, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, Lon Chaney, Nathanael West, and Diane Arbus use these desires to propose alternatives to the autonomous and repressed subject of liberal capitalism. Blyn explains how, rather than grounding revolutionary subjectivities in imaginary realms innocent of capitalism, freak-garde works manufacture new subjectivities by exploiting potentials inherent to capitalism. Defying conventional wisdom, The Freak-garde ultimately argues that postmodernism is not the death of the avant-garde but the inheritor of a vital and generative legacy. In doing so, the book establishes innovative approaches to American avant-garde practices and embodiment and lays the foundation for a more nuanced understanding of the disruptive potential of art under capitalism.
