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Podcast: Today In History with The Retrospectors
Episode: Inside Barnum's Museum
Description: Happy New Year! Our first episode of 2024 recalls Today In History in 1842 - the day P.T. Barnum opened his ‘American Museum’ in New York, replete with a flea circus, ‘Siamese’ twins, and a ‘mermaid’ skeleton.The ‘museum’ merged authentic specimens with audacious hoaxes, blurring the line between reality and fiction, exploiting many of its star performers, and bewitching the public. It followed on from the ‘Greatest Showman’s earlier triumph: exhibiting an elderly enslaved woman, Joyce Heth, who claimed to be 161 years old and George Washington's nurse. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly consider how...