The big tent
Subtitle: the traveling circus in Georgia, 1820-1930
By: by Gregory J. Renoff.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Number of pages: 235
ISBN-13: 9780820328928
Subjects: Circus -- Georgia -- History; Circus -- Social aspects -- Georgia
Description: "For many people, the circus, with its clowns, exotic beasts, and other colorful iconography, is lighthearted entertainment. Yet for Gregory J. Renoff and other scholars, the circus and its social context also provide a richly suggestive repository of changing attitudes about race, class, religion, and consumerism. In the South during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, traveling circuses fostered social spaces where people of all classes and colors could grapple with the region's upheavals."

"The Big Tent relates the circus experience from the perspectives of its diverse audiences, telling what locals might have seen and done while the show was in town. Renoff digs deeper, too. He points out, for instance, that the performances of these itinerant outfits in Jim Crow-era Georgia allowed boisterous, unrestrained interaction between blacks and whites on show lots and city streets on Circus Day. Renoff also looks at encounters between southerners and the largely northern population of circus owners, promoters, and performers, who were frequently accused of inciting public disorder and purveying lowbrow prurience, in part due to residual anger over the Civil War."

"Ranging across a changing social, cultural, and economic landscape, The Big Tent tells a new history of what happened when the circus came to town, from the time it traveled by wagon and river barge through its heyday during the railroad era and into its final decline in the age of the automobile and mass consumerism."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Get the show on the road : circus trouping in the old south; title: Selling southernism : showmen in Georgia, 1865-1874; title: The slow embrace : religion, social status, and circus attendance, 1865-1920; title: Wait for the big show! The economics of the circus in Georgia, 1865-1920; title: The canvas city : social mixing on circus day, 1870-1920; title: Performers in bleachers : audience behavior and social interaction in turn-of-the-century circus tents; title: It's showtime : the cultural content of the circus, 1880-1920; title: Sparks circus and the reinvention of circus day.