Society has long been fascinated with the freakish, shocking and strange. In this book Gary Cross shows how freakish elements have been embedded in modern popular culture over the course of the 20th century despite the evident disenchantment with this once widespread cultural outlet. Exploring how the spectacle of freakishness conflicted with genteel culture, he shows how the condemnation of the freak show by middle-class America led to a transformation and merging of genteel and freak culture through the cute, the camp and the creepy. Though the carnival and circus freak was marginalised by the 1960s and had largely disappeared by the 1980s, forms of freakish culture survived and today appear in reality TV, horror movies, dark comedies and the popularity of tattoos. Freak Show Legacies will focus less on the individual 'freak' as 'the other' in society, and more on the audience for the freakish and the transformation of wonder, sensibility and sensitivity that this phenomenon entailed. It will use the phenomenon of 'the freak' to understand the transformation of American popular culture across the 20th century, identify elements of 'the freak' in popular culture both past and present, and ask how it has prevailed despite its apparent unpopularity.

Human Menageries: Freak Show Legacies in Contemporary American Literature and Popular Culture Human Menageries examines representations of freaks in late-twentieth century and early-twenty-first century American literature and popular culture. Freak shows reached the height of their popularity between 1840 and 1940, and the performative conventions they established for the display of extraordinary bodies continue within contemporary American culture as a means of defining bodily normalcy and deviance through spectacular visual representation. While some contemporary relocations make use of freak representations to reinforce bodily norms, others appropriate freak identity and conventions in a subversive fashion. Human Menageries enacts a close and historically contextual reading of the work of contemporary writers, visual artists, and performers such as Margaret Cho, Loren Cameron, Octavia E. Butler, Jewelle Gomez, Charlaine Harris, Aimee Bender, and Lady Gaga who revise and appropriate conventions from the historic freak show for purposes of social subversion and critique. This project immerses itself in current discussions within freak studies (a subfield of disability studies initiated by scholars such as Robert Bogdan, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Rachel Adams) that question to what extent bodily spectacles function as forms of exploitation or liberation. Human Menageries mediates this divide by theorizing the multifaceted effects of contemporary relocations of the American freak show and arguing that cultural producers use the freak show's performative conventions to challenge norms of embodiment, draw intersectional connections between multiple non-normative identity positions, and provide interdisciplinary strategies for reading human bodies that gesture toward the creation of a reality in which embodied difference is not regarded as remarkable, but as a standard human attribute.

In this lavishly illustrated guide to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, Steven Lubar and Kathleen M. Kendrick tell the stories behind more than 250 of the museum's treasures, many of them never before photographed for publication. These stories not only reveal what America as a nation has decided to save and why but also speak to changing visions of national identity.

Revealing how the White House will be won in 2008, two of the country's most accomplished political reporters explain what separates the victors from the victims in the unforgiving environment of modern presidential campaigns.

A groundbreaking anthology that probes the disposition towards the visually different Giants. Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled. The very hirsute. In American history, all have shared the platform equally, as freaks, human oddities, their only commonality their assigned role of anomalous other to the gathered throngs. For the price of a ticket, freak shows offered spectators an icon of bodily otherness whose difference from them secured their own membership in a common American identity--by comparison ordinary, tractable, normal. Rosemarie Thomson's groundbreaking anthology probes America's disposition toward the visually different. The book's essays fall into four main categories: historical explorations of American freak shows in the era of P.T. Barnum; the articulation of the freak in literary and textual discourses; contemporary relocations of freak shows; and theoretical analyses of freak culture. Essays address such diverse topics as American colonialism and public presentations of natives; laughing gas demonstrations in the 1840's; Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb; Todd Browning's landmark movie Freaks; bodybuilders as postmodern freaks; freaks in Star Trek; Michael Jackson's identification with the Elephant Man; and the modern talk show as a reconfiguration of the freak show. In her introduction, Thomson traces the freak show from antiquity to the modern period and explores the constitutive, political, and textual properties of such exhibits. Freakery is a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected aspect of American mass culture.

Pittacus Lore finished telling the story of the Lorien Nine in the New York Times bestselling I Am Number Four and Lorien Legacies Reborn series. Now he’s back to recount an all-new adventure rooted in the real mysteries surrounding Roswell, New Mexico, that will enthrall fans of Brandon Sanderson, Jay Kristoff, and Amie Kaufman. We have waited generations for you… Syd Chambers knows that there’s life on other planets because he’s descended from it. His father was from a distant world called Denza and has been missing—presumed dead—for years. When Syd discovers a device his father left behind which shows not only that he’s alive, but where he is, Syd must set out on a mission of his own. But along the way, he discovers a deadly, unbearable secret that could destroy Denza, Earth, and the universe.