TY  - BOOK
AU  - Dennett,Andrea Stulman
TI  - Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America 
SN  - 9780814718858
AV  - AM11 .D46 1997
U1  - 069/.0973 21
PY  - 1997///]
CY  - New York, NY : 
PB  - New York University Press, 
KW  - Curiosities and wonders
KW  - Museums
KW  - United States
KW  - History
KW  - Dime museums
KW  - Eccentrics and eccentricities
KW  - Popular culture
KW  - HISTORY / United States / General
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - Weird
KW  - Wonderful
KW  - amusement
KW  - cabinet
KW  - century
KW  - chronicles
KW  - curiosities
KW  - death
KW  - dime
KW  - early
KW  - eighteenth-century
KW  - evolution
KW  - from
KW  - hands
KW  - inception
KW  - museum
KW  - technologies
KW  - twentieth
N1  - restricted access
N2  - Dioramas and panoramas, freaks and magicians, waxworks and menageries, obscure relics and stuffed animals--a dazzling assortment of curiosities attracted the gaze of the nineteenth-century spectator at the dime museum. This distinctly American phenomenon was unprecedented in both the diversity of its amusements and in its democratic appeal, with audiences traversing the boundaries of ethnicity, gender, and class. Andrea Stulman Dennett's Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America recaptures this ephemeral and scarcely documented institution of American culture from the margins of history. Weird and Wonderful chronicles the evolution of the dime museum from its eighteenth-century inception as a "cabinet of curiosities" to its death at the hands of new amusement technologies in the early twentieth century. From big theaters which accommodated audiences of three thousand to meager converted storefronts exhibiting petrified wood and living anomalies, this study vividly reanimates the array of museums, exhibits, and performances that make up this entertainment institution. Tracing the scattered legacy of the dime museum from vaudeville theater to Ripley's museum to the talk show spectacles of today, Dennett makes a significant contribution to the history of American popular entertainment
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780814744215
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780814744215/original
ER  -