Happy Saturday, Everybody. Petty Barnum has gotten a couple of name drops on the show lately, and there is another coming up this week, so we are bringing out our episode on him as Today's Classic. This originally came out on May sixteen, twenty twelve, from previous hosts of the show, Sarah and Bablina enjoying Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chocolate Boarding, and we have a few podcast regulars who we like to talk about. Queen Victoria, of course, seems to pop up in the most unlikely of episodes, as does Arthur Conan Doyle Lord Byron had a little run there for a while, but Pete Barnum may have the strangest record of all of those folks. I think if an episode takes place in the nineteenth century, you'll often find P. T. Barnum somewhere in it, trying to buy something, trying to hustle someone. And once I learned a little bit more about his life, though, those regular appearances seemed a lot less unlikely, because in life he really was everywhere, buying odds and ends off of folks, cooking up hoaxes, entertaining celebrities, even running for state legislature. Today, of course we think of P. T. Barnum as the great circus man, the guy behind the greatest show on Earth. Along with his cohort and former competitor James Bailey, the Barnum and Bailey Circus, which eventually teamed up with Ringling brother Circus, became the premier circus in the US. So if you've seen one circus in the States, it's probably Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey. But while Barnum helped to make the Three Ring Circus the massive spectacle we know today, he really didn't get into the business until he was in the sixties. For most of his entertainment career, Barnum ran a curiosity museum filled with wax works, fun house mirrors, and other strange stuff like taxi jermy hybrid animals. He also ran ten in one shows, which we'll talk about a little bit more in a minute, and he managed Menagerie's and he just really promoted everything he did, earning the nickname the Prince of Humbug, which it's interesting to point out here that humbug had the same meaning then as it does today, you know, being deceitful on purpose. But it also was the equivalent of what today we'd call hype. And I think that's really the point to remember when thinking about Barnum. He was a hype man. He was the prince of Humbug to the end. He really was so phineas. Taylor Barnum was born July ten in Bethel, Connecticut. His father was kind of a jack of all trades who was a tailor, a farmer, tavern keeper, and as a kid, p T. Barnum worked the farm, but also showed his business streak pretty early. According to his New York Times obituary, he sold homemade molasses candy which sounds pretty good, and gingerbread, and even some sort of moonshine he'd make called cherry rum, not quite as appetizing as the molasses candy and gingerbread, I think. When Barnum was fifteen, his father died, leaving him to care for his mother and his five sisters and brothers. This started a string of jobs and moves to get away from manual farm work because he really disliked it. He worked in a general store, moved to Brooklyn, and came home to Bethel to open his own store at age eighteen. Then he got married at nineteen to a local girl named Charity Hallett. He published a weekly paper called The Herald of Freedom and Dan Barry Connecticut, and was arrested three times for libel gives you a little peek at his his future career too, but it was his eighteen thirty five moved back to New York City at the age of twenty five that really got him into show business and compared to his later insistence on family friendly entertainment, his first gigs in New York were considered quite low amusements, according to Timothy Gilfoyle and then Journal of the History of Sexuality. He'd run minstrel shows. He'd write ads for the Bowery Amphitheater in the very rough Five Points neighborhood, and he would talent scout there too. He discovered acts like William Henry Lane, who was better known later as Juba Black Dancer, who broke into the all white minstrel shows. But Barnum's first really big discovery was an old woman named Joyce Heth and Heth claimed to have been born in sixteen seventy four, which would have made her a hundred and sixty one years old. But even more impressively, she claimed to have been the nurse for the young George Washington. She was blind and frail, but she'd smoke a pipe and tell visitors stories about Washington as a boy. To kind of authenticate these outrageous stories, Barnum presented her alongside her seventeen twenty seven bill of sale to George Washington's father. So no surprise probably that this was eventually exposed as a hoax, but at certain he convinced to Barnum that show biz was worth as a while. With Heth and his act, he earned seven and fifty dollars a week. So in eighteen forty one, after that first big success with Health, Barnum decided that he wanted to go into the museum business. Then it may be kind of hard to understand why a hoax promoting former minstrel show admin would want to get into museums, but David A. Norris, writing in History Magazine, helped explain a little bit to me how different and uncommon American museums were in the eighteen forties from what they are today, and one of the country's earliest museums was called Peels, and it was in Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Was established in seventeen eighty four by Charles Wilson Peel, and visitors who were going there could just see a real mixed bag of stuff, folk clothing from around the world, a quote tiger cat, even lava from Mount Vesuvius, or at least something billed as lava from Mount Vesuvius. The first mastodon skull laton shown in the United States was there, and there were also plant and animal specimens from Lewis and Clark's expedition, so anything you could imagine could be found, apparently at Peel's museum. Another major museum in the style of Peels was that of John Scutter, who ran his front of five story marble building in New York City. When Scutter's closed in one Barnum tried to buy it, but was beat out by representatives from Peels, who paid for the building in stock. When that stock collapse, though, Barnum wound up being able not only to buy Scutters but quite a few of Peel's exhibits too. He reopened this as Barnum's American Museum and kept some of the flavor of the old style museums, including the menagerie's tax Germy's exotic items from around the world, But he also added another popular element of the day, which was freak shows. Okay, so it's time to talk a little bit about the tradition of so called freak shows, because if we just jump right into it, it's going to seem a little bit out of place. According to Laura Grand in History Magazine, the tradition of freak shows had really been around for quite some time by the time Barnum was getting into the business, really since the early sixteen hundreds, right around the time that many people stopped seeing major physical abnormalities as some kind of divine punishment or bad omen But in the nineteenth century, the exhibition of people with physical abnormalities bearded ladies for example, or thin men, really started to pick up. Ten and one shows would exhibit ten performers, usually a mix of physically unusual people with folks with unusual talents such as sword swallowing or fire eating. So two of the earliest American freak show stars where Chang and Hang can join twins the original Siamese Twins, of course, and basically visitors would walk by these ten performers and look at them. It's something that sounds very awkward and uncomfortable today, but these shows were really getting very popular in the nineteenth century, and Barnum's technique of combining these ten and one shows and other types of freak show acts with a curiosity filled museum proved to be a major hit. Visitors would flood to his American museum, paying twenty five cents for the privilege of seeing his curated collection from around the world. He built the place as admission to everything, and in addition to a sideshow type performances, he staged beauty pageants, cultural exhibits, and dramatics like adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels or those of Charles Dickens, who was incidentally a visitor. So the museum was open six days a week, fifteen hours a day. He was a real modern businessman. I mean, I even think that admission to everything sounds kind of like a slogan you would hear today um. But well, many side shows at the time featured adults only entertainment. Barnett was really big on bringing the whole family, and the whole family was there, though he would hustle them through the exhibits by displaying a large sign in the back labeled egress, and so people would wonder, what's an egress? You know, it's just beyond that door I need to go see, And then once they get there, they'd realize, oh, agres is just another word for exit, and they'd have to pay if they wanted to get back in again. The museum's first big hit was the Fiji Mermaid, supposedly caught by a Japanese fisherman, but this was really just a hoax personally engineered by Barnum. It was a monkey's body sewn onto a large fish tail. Other attractions over the years included a giant python and electric eels, and albino Beauty, the Wild Boy, who was an exceptionally hairy child, Pharaoh's Chariot Wheel, Rosa Richter, the Human Cannonball, Annie Jones, the Bearded Lady Eyes, W. Sprague, the American human Skeleton, kral Farini, the Missing Link, the Wonder of the World, who was an armless man who used his feet to do tricks like firing a pistol or playing an instrument. In eighteen sixty one, Barnum even added a white whale to his menagerie's pipes, would supply it with fresh seawater, and he'd also include hoaxes of hoaxes, like the fake version of the already fake Cardiff Giant we discussed in our Historical Hoaxes episode from last summer. After Barnum's offer to buy the real fake Giant was turned down, he just made his own and started saying, well, that one is fake, I have the real one, I think. Ultimately he was sued and the judge rule, both of your giants are fake. This is a non issue. Um. Barnum himself was also something of an attraction at his museum, much like Madam Tussot was at her wax works. He was fairly striking six two balding, He had blue eyes and a giant nose in a pot belly, and was always there, always roaming around if he wasn't out looking for new curiosities to bring to it. Barnum's real name maker, though, was his own distant cousin, Charles Stratton, and we'll talk a little bit more about Stratton's life later. Maybe in a different episode. He and Barnum went from being manager and child performer to being business partners and lifelong friends. But Stratton's appearance as General Tom Thumb introduced Barnum to really new heights of fame. Stratton, who was a little person tall when he was discovered by Barnum at age five, was trained to sing, dance, and do comic compressions. He was a natural ham and an actor, and met folks like Abraham Lincoln and even Queen Victoria. She is again we need to start keeping a tally here. But Barnum had ambitions outside of the museum, even though Tom Thumb made him a huge hit in this world. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, he wanted to be an impressar oh too, and he recruited the Swedish soprano Jenny Lynn to make that happen. She's somebody who appeared in our Hans Christian Anderson episode. He had She was his celebrity crush. Essentially, even though Barnum hadn't ever seen Lynn, hadn't ever heard her sing, he blatched onto her, decided that she would be his ticket to the real big time, and publicized her as the Swedish Nightingale. He publicized her so successfully that forty thou people were waiting for her upon her arrival in the United States. She toured for about nine months to sell out shows and really became one of the earliest marketing sensations to She had all this tie in merchandise connected to her, like a Jenny Lynn bonnet, a Jenny Lynn porcelain set, all sorts of things that are easy to imagine today, but we're fairly unusual at the time. Barnum also got into politics. He served twice in the Connecticut legislature and as mayor of Bridgeport, where he was an especially strong opponent of racial discrimination and and of prostitution. In eighteen forty eight, he became a teetotaler, hiring undercover detectives to patrol his museum for anyone who could be maybe sneaking in a drink, or just any low people. He was very concerned about them potentially being in his museum. Kind of odd considering his earlier show. His career exactly when he got into real estate in the eighteen fifties, he'd even have leaser's or buyers signed covenants banning the use of liquor or tobacco on the property. He even eventually made his performers swear off alcohol and ran a temperance play at the museum for one hundred shows. So to mark all of his achievements in life. At this point in politics in the business world, Barnum decided to build a palace. And you can't imagine somebody like Barnum building a little understated house, but this really was a palace. It was on seventeen acres in Connecticut. He called it a Ranistan and the inspiration for the building was Brighton's Royal Pavilion, which I saw when I was in ninth grade, I think, and it's a can look up a picture of it. It's pretty elaborate. Anything that it's the inspiration for would be pretty elaborate to I'd imagine. He entertained big names there too, people like Mark Twain, Horace Greeley. But in eighteen fifty seven Barnum's luck started to turn. The palace burned down, which started a chain of misfortune that eventually drove Barnum coincidentally into the circus business. He lost his money though through bad investments in a clock of business and saw his museum burned down twice. During the Civil War, Confederate spies had plotted to set fires throughout New York City, including one at Barnum's. The plot failed, with the museum burned down just a few months later. Anyway, after twice rebuilding his museum and twice losing it to fire, he switched to a menagerie, but saw this burned down two in eighteen seventy three. That same year, his wife Charity died, and two outward appearances. After Charity died, Barnum waited ten months before remarrying twenty two year old Nancy Fish, who was forty four years younger than him. According to that Guilfoil article we mentioned earlier, though he was actually remarried after only thirteen weeks and before he had even returned home to the United States following charities death. The whole thing was super super secret. Nobody knew about it except the couple, and the marriage certificate wasn't even found until nineteen four, so he really took the secret to the grave. Barnum's remarriage also coincided with his entrance into the circus world. Though he started a traveling show and called it the Great Traveling World's Fair. It was really bigger than most of the circuses of the day, and Barnum would even arrange it was so big, in fact, that it would have to be way on the outskirts of town. So Barnum would arrange these excursion trains so that people in cities could easily come to his show. He could just shuttle them back and forth and get more customers that way. In eighteen eighty he merged with the Great London Circus, Sanger's Royal British Menagerie and the Grand International Allied Shows, and later became the Barnum and Bailey Circus, better known as the Greatest Show on Earth, which we talked about in the intro. Barnum, of course, didn't invent the modern circus, but by working with Bailey, he helped make it the giant, really spectacular event that we know it as today, rather than the sort of small time entertainment it was in the past. Exactly, and Barnum's eighty two purchase of Jumbo the African Elephant also helped to make this act a hit, really helped to make the Barnum and Bailey Circus get off the ground. Jumbo is another subject we're gonna say for later. He has a pretty interesting story, but he was popular enough that his name caught on as a term for Jumbo, really really big um. That's just a little hint of how crazy Jumbo's ultimate story is. Though, the Prince of Humbug stayed devoted to self promotion to the end too. In eighteen eighty four, he moved his autobiography into the public domain because he was more concerned with attracting readers than making money off of it. In at the age of eighty one and clearly dying at this point, he had a New York obituary published ahead of schedule so that he could read it and enjoy his own hype before he passed away. So P. T. Barnum died April seven in Bridgeport, leaving most of his estate to his sole grandson, and aside from his circus legacy, of course, I think Barnum is probably most famous for a quote that he likely never said, and that's, of course, there's a sucker born every minute. We meant to mention that in the Cardiff Giant episode one quote that might suit him a little better, though in one that he really did say is that people quote appear disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived. And he got a lot of flak for some of his deceptions. I think he was pretty frank about them in his autobiography, but he stuck by it to a certain extent. Revised some things in his in his biography, but was fairly open a out the deceptions he had committed and how he did them, and how it was all just in good fun if you still enjoyed the show. According to his biographer Candice Fleming, when he was asked whether he wished he had done something more important with his life, he said, quote, Amusement may not be the great aim of life, but it gives us to our days. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast, The I heart Radio app and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you miss in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

Happy Saturday, Everybody. Petty Barnum has gotten a couple of name drops on the show lately, and there is another coming up this week, so we are bringing out our episode on him as Today's Classic. This originally came out on May sixteen, twenty twelve, from previous hosts of the show, Sarah and Bablina enjoying Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chocolate Boarding, and we have a few podcast regulars who we like to talk about. Queen Victoria, of course, seems to pop up in the most unlikely of episodes, as does Arthur Conan Doyle Lord Byron had a little run there for a while, but Pete Barnum may have the strangest record of all of those folks. I think if an episode takes place in the nineteenth century, you'll often find P. T. Barnum somewhere in it, trying to buy something, trying to hustle someone. And once I learned a little bit more about his life, though, those regular appearances seemed a lot less unlikely, because in life he really was everywhere, buying odds and ends off of folks, cooking up hoaxes, entertaining celebrities, even running for state legislature. Today, of course we think of P. T. Barnum as the great circus man, the guy behind the greatest show on Earth. Along with his cohort and former competitor James Bailey, the Barnum and Bailey Circus, which eventually teamed up with Ringling brother Circus, became the premier circus in the US. So if you've seen one circus in the States, it's probably Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey. But while Barnum helped to make the Three Ring Circus the massive spectacle we know today, he really didn't get into the business until he was in the sixties. For most of his entertainment career, Barnum ran a curiosity museum filled with wax works, fun house mirrors, and other strange stuff like taxi jermy hybrid animals. He also ran ten in one shows, which we'll talk about a little bit more in a minute, and he managed Menagerie's and he just really promoted everything he did, earning the nickname the Prince of Humbug, which it's interesting to point out here that humbug had the same meaning then as it does today, you know, being deceitful on purpose. But it also was the equivalent of what today we'd call hype. And I think that's really the point to remember when thinking about Barnum. He was a hype man. He was the prince of Humbug to the end. He really was so phineas. Taylor Barnum was born July ten in Bethel, Connecticut. His father was kind of a jack of all trades who was a tailor, a farmer, tavern keeper, and as a kid, p T. Barnum worked the farm, but also showed his business streak pretty early. According to his New York Times obituary, he sold homemade molasses candy which sounds pretty good, and gingerbread, and even some sort of moonshine he'd make called cherry rum, not quite as appetizing as the molasses candy and gingerbread, I think. When Barnum was fifteen, his father died, leaving him to care for his mother and his five sisters and brothers. This started a string of jobs and moves to get away from manual farm work because he really disliked it. He worked in a general store, moved to Brooklyn, and came home to Bethel to open his own store at age eighteen. Then he got married at nineteen to a local girl named Charity Hallett. He published a weekly paper called The Herald of Freedom and Dan Barry Connecticut, and was arrested three times for libel gives you a little peek at his his future career too, but it was his eighteen thirty five moved back to New York City at the age of twenty five that really got him into show business and compared to his later insistence on family friendly entertainment, his first gigs in New York were considered quite low amusements, according to Timothy Gilfoyle and then Journal of the History of Sexuality. He'd run minstrel shows. He'd write ads for the Bowery Amphitheater in the very rough Five Points neighborhood, and he would talent scout there too. He discovered acts like William Henry Lane, who was better known later as Juba Black Dancer, who broke into the all white minstrel shows. But Barnum's first really big discovery was an old woman named Joyce Heth and Heth claimed to have been born in sixteen seventy four, which would have made her a hundred and sixty one years old. But even more impressively, she claimed to have been the nurse for the young George Washington. She was blind and frail, but she'd smoke a pipe and tell visitors stories about Washington as a boy. To kind of authenticate these outrageous stories, Barnum presented her alongside her seventeen twenty seven bill of sale to George Washington's father. So no surprise probably that this was eventually exposed as a hoax, but at certain he convinced to Barnum that show biz was worth as a while. With Heth and his act, he earned seven and fifty dollars a week. So in eighteen forty one, after that first big success with Health, Barnum decided that he wanted to go into the museum business. Then it may be kind of hard to understand why a hoax promoting former minstrel show admin would want to get into museums, but David A. Norris, writing in History Magazine, helped explain a little bit to me how different and uncommon American museums were in the eighteen forties from what they are today, and one of the country's earliest museums was called Peels, and it was in Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Was established in seventeen eighty four by Charles Wilson Peel, and visitors who were going there could just see a real mixed bag of stuff, folk clothing from around the world, a quote tiger cat, even lava from Mount Vesuvius, or at least something billed as lava from Mount Vesuvius. The first mastodon skull laton shown in the United States was there, and there were also plant and animal specimens from Lewis and Clark's expedition, so anything you could imagine could be found, apparently at Peel's museum. Another major museum in the style of Peels was that of John Scutter, who ran his front of five story marble building in New York City. When Scutter's closed in one Barnum tried to buy it, but was beat out by representatives from Peels, who paid for the building in stock. When that stock collapse, though, Barnum wound up being able not only to buy Scutters but quite a few of Peel's exhibits too. He reopened this as Barnum's American Museum and kept some of the flavor of the old style museums, including the menagerie's tax Germy's exotic items from around the world, But he also added another popular element of the day, which was freak shows. Okay, so it's time to talk a little bit about the tradition of so called freak shows, because if we just jump right into it, it's going to seem a little bit out of place. According to Laura Grand in History Magazine, the tradition of freak shows had really been around for quite some time by the time Barnum was getting into the business, really since the early sixteen hundreds, right around the time that many people stopped seeing major physical abnormalities as some kind of divine punishment or bad omen But in the nineteenth century, the exhibition of people with physical abnormalities bearded ladies for example, or thin men, really started to pick up. Ten and one shows would exhibit ten performers, usually a mix of physically unusual people with folks with unusual talents such as sword swallowing or fire eating. So two of the earliest American freak show stars where Chang and Hang can join twins the original Siamese Twins, of course, and basically visitors would walk by these ten performers and look at them. It's something that sounds very awkward and uncomfortable today, but these shows were really getting very popular in the nineteenth century, and Barnum's technique of combining these ten and one shows and other types of freak show acts with a curiosity filled museum proved to be a major hit. Visitors would flood to his American museum, paying twenty five cents for the privilege of seeing his curated collection from around the world. He built the place as admission to everything, and in addition to a sideshow type performances, he staged beauty pageants, cultural exhibits, and dramatics like adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels or those of Charles Dickens, who was incidentally a visitor. So the museum was open six days a week, fifteen hours a day. He was a real modern businessman. I mean, I even think that admission to everything sounds kind of like a slogan you would hear today um. But well, many side shows at the time featured adults only entertainment. Barnett was really big on bringing the whole family, and the whole family was there, though he would hustle them through the exhibits by displaying a large sign in the back labeled egress, and so people would wonder, what's an egress? You know, it's just beyond that door I need to go see, And then once they get there, they'd realize, oh, agres is just another word for exit, and they'd have to pay if they wanted to get back in again. The museum's first big hit was the Fiji Mermaid, supposedly caught by a Japanese fisherman, but this was really just a hoax personally engineered by Barnum. It was a monkey's body sewn onto a large fish tail. Other attractions over the years included a giant python and electric eels, and albino Beauty, the Wild Boy, who was an exceptionally hairy child, Pharaoh's Chariot Wheel, Rosa Richter, the Human Cannonball, Annie Jones, the Bearded Lady Eyes, W. Sprague, the American human Skeleton, kral Farini, the Missing Link, the Wonder of the World, who was an armless man who used his feet to do tricks like firing a pistol or playing an instrument. In eighteen sixty one, Barnum even added a white whale to his menagerie's pipes, would supply it with fresh seawater, and he'd also include hoaxes of hoaxes, like the fake version of the already fake Cardiff Giant we discussed in our Historical Hoaxes episode from last summer. After Barnum's offer to buy the real fake Giant was turned down, he just made his own and started saying, well, that one is fake, I have the real one, I think. Ultimately he was sued and the judge rule, both of your giants are fake. This is a non issue. Um. Barnum himself was also something of an attraction at his museum, much like Madam Tussot was at her wax works. He was fairly striking six two balding, He had blue eyes and a giant nose in a pot belly, and was always there, always roaming around if he wasn't out looking for new curiosities to bring to it. Barnum's real name maker, though, was his own distant cousin, Charles Stratton, and we'll talk a little bit more about Stratton's life later. Maybe in a different episode. He and Barnum went from being manager and child performer to being business partners and lifelong friends. But Stratton's appearance as General Tom Thumb introduced Barnum to really new heights of fame. Stratton, who was a little person tall when he was discovered by Barnum at age five, was trained to sing, dance, and do comic compressions. He was a natural ham and an actor, and met folks like Abraham Lincoln and even Queen Victoria. She is again we need to start keeping a tally here. But Barnum had ambitions outside of the museum, even though Tom Thumb made him a huge hit in this world. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, he wanted to be an impressar oh too, and he recruited the Swedish soprano Jenny Lynn to make that happen. She's somebody who appeared in our Hans Christian Anderson episode. He had She was his celebrity crush. Essentially, even though Barnum hadn't ever seen Lynn, hadn't ever heard her sing, he blatched onto her, decided that she would be his ticket to the real big time, and publicized her as the Swedish Nightingale. He publicized her so successfully that forty thou people were waiting for her upon her arrival in the United States. She toured for about nine months to sell out shows and really became one of the earliest marketing sensations to She had all this tie in merchandise connected to her, like a Jenny Lynn bonnet, a Jenny Lynn porcelain set, all sorts of things that are easy to imagine today, but we're fairly unusual at the time. Barnum also got into politics. He served twice in the Connecticut legislature and as mayor of Bridgeport, where he was an especially strong opponent of racial discrimination and and of prostitution. In eighteen forty eight, he became a teetotaler, hiring undercover detectives to patrol his museum for anyone who could be maybe sneaking in a drink, or just any low people. He was very concerned about them potentially being in his museum. Kind of odd considering his earlier show. His career exactly when he got into real estate in the eighteen fifties, he'd even have leaser's or buyers signed covenants banning the use of liquor or tobacco on the property. He even eventually made his performers swear off alcohol and ran a temperance play at the museum for one hundred shows. So to mark all of his achievements in life. At this point in politics in the business world, Barnum decided to build a palace. And you can't imagine somebody like Barnum building a little understated house, but this really was a palace. It was on seventeen acres in Connecticut. He called it a Ranistan and the inspiration for the building was Brighton's Royal Pavilion, which I saw when I was in ninth grade, I think, and it's a can look up a picture of it. It's pretty elaborate. Anything that it's the inspiration for would be pretty elaborate to I'd imagine. He entertained big names there too, people like Mark Twain, Horace Greeley. But in eighteen fifty seven Barnum's luck started to turn. The palace burned down, which started a chain of misfortune that eventually drove Barnum coincidentally into the circus business. He lost his money though through bad investments in a clock of business and saw his museum burned down twice. During the Civil War, Confederate spies had plotted to set fires throughout New York City, including one at Barnum's. The plot failed, with the museum burned down just a few months later. Anyway, after twice rebuilding his museum and twice losing it to fire, he switched to a menagerie, but saw this burned down two in eighteen seventy three. That same year, his wife Charity died, and two outward appearances. After Charity died, Barnum waited ten months before remarrying twenty two year old Nancy Fish, who was forty four years younger than him. According to that Guilfoil article we mentioned earlier, though he was actually remarried after only thirteen weeks and before he had even returned home to the United States following charities death. The whole thing was super super secret. Nobody knew about it except the couple, and the marriage certificate wasn't even found until nineteen four, so he really took the secret to the grave. Barnum's remarriage also coincided with his entrance into the circus world. Though he started a traveling show and called it the Great Traveling World's Fair. It was really bigger than most of the circuses of the day, and Barnum would even arrange it was so big, in fact, that it would have to be way on the outskirts of town. So Barnum would arrange these excursion trains so that people in cities could easily come to his show. He could just shuttle them back and forth and get more customers that way. In eighteen eighty he merged with the Great London Circus, Sanger's Royal British Menagerie and the Grand International Allied Shows, and later became the Barnum and Bailey Circus, better known as the Greatest Show on Earth, which we talked about in the intro. Barnum, of course, didn't invent the modern circus, but by working with Bailey, he helped make it the giant, really spectacular event that we know it as today, rather than the sort of small time entertainment it was in the past. Exactly, and Barnum's eighty two purchase of Jumbo the African Elephant also helped to make this act a hit, really helped to make the Barnum and Bailey Circus get off the ground. Jumbo is another subject we're gonna say for later. He has a pretty interesting story, but he was popular enough that his name caught on as a term for Jumbo, really really big um. That's just a little hint of how crazy Jumbo's ultimate story is. Though, the Prince of Humbug stayed devoted to self promotion to the end too. In eighteen eighty four, he moved his autobiography into the public domain because he was more concerned with attracting readers than making money off of it. In at the age of eighty one and clearly dying at this point, he had a New York obituary published ahead of schedule so that he could read it and enjoy his own hype before he passed away. So P. T. Barnum died April seven in Bridgeport, leaving most of his estate to his sole grandson, and aside from his circus legacy, of course, I think Barnum is probably most famous for a quote that he likely never said, and that's, of course, there's a sucker born every minute. We meant to mention that in the Cardiff Giant episode one quote that might suit him a little better, though in one that he really did say is that people quote appear disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived. And he got a lot of flak for some of his deceptions. I think he was pretty frank about them in his autobiography, but he stuck by it to a certain extent. Revised some things in his in his biography, but was fairly open a out the deceptions he had committed and how he did them, and how it was all just in good fun if you still enjoyed the show. According to his biographer Candice Fleming, when he was asked whether he wished he had done something more important with his life, he said, quote, Amusement may not be the great aim of life, but it gives us to our days. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast, The I heart Radio app and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you miss in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H