Barnum’s Imperium: American Entertainers and the Nineteenth-Century Pacific

In the wake of the California Gold Rush, American entertainers flocked to the Pacific Coast and promptly pushed into emergent overseas markets, giving birth to a vibrant entertainment circuit that fomented interactions and mediated exchanges between the United States and the diverse communities and cultures of the Pacific world. This project looks at the experiences a motley group of pioneering performers, ranging from minstrel troupes and magicians to the diminutive celebrity General Tom Thumb, who traveled to Hawaii, Japan, Australia, and other locales around the Pacific during the mid-nineteenth century. The transnational trajectory of the United States entertainment industry was grounded in a robust and diverse domestic market, and as these performers and shows toured they communicated some of the first and most immediate ideas of America to audiences abroad. But popular entertainment also provided a forum for cultural exchange that saw American cultural forms variously enjoyed, appropriated, reworked, and rejected as they circulated overseas. By examining some key figures and moments in the manifestation of the Pacific circuit, this project illuminates how itinerant entertainers revamped American culture and evaluates their impact on the people and places that they encountered along the way.