Entertainment in the Guilded Age

Visitors of the museum could see ventriloquists, magicians, albinos, and a 5-year-old midget whom Barnum named General Tom Thumb. By 1850, the American Museum became the most well known museum, and set the standards for many museums soon to come. Most often performed were melodramas, whose plots resembled those of sentimental novels. Barnum neither knew nor old the woman actually was; it was enough for people to pay to see her. The plays themselves were as diverse as the audiences. Minstrelsy borrowed some authentic elements of African-American culture, especially dances characterized by the sliding, shuffling step of southern blacks, but most of the songs had origins in white culture. Vise was punished, virtue rewarded, and the heroine finally married the hero. During such an interlude, the audience would have observed perhaps a brief impersonation of Tecumseh or Aaron Burr, jugglers and acrobats, and drummer beating 12 drums at once, or a three-year old weighing a hundred pounds. Barnum- after moving to New York City in 18, Barnum started a new career as an entrepreneur of popular entertainment His first venture exhibited a black woman, whom Barnum billed as the 169-year-old former slave nurse of George Washington. illiam Macready’s feud ended with a riot at New York City’s Astor Place that left twenty people dead. Strictly speaking cared how, he cheated the public, but he knew that many of his customers shared his doubts about the woman’s age.

The Minstrel Shows- Minstrel shows arose in northern cities in the 1840s, as blackfaced white men took to the stage to present an evening of songs, dances, and humorous sketches. The producers of the plays arranged for short performances or demonstrations between the acts of the most famous play write, William Shakespeare.