The Public Domain Review

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Circassian Beauty in the American Sideshow

Thursday 16 September 2021 at 12:07

Among the “human curiosities” in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum was a supposed escapee from an Ottoman harem, a figure marketed as both the pinnacle of white beauty and an exoticised other. Betsy Golden Kellem investigates the complex of racial and cultural stereotypes that made the Circassian beauty such a sideshow spectacle.

Source: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/circassian-beauties