Leslie Choquette

A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland – By John Mack Faragher

Barnum’s serialized pseudo-autobiography, Adventures of an Adventurer [1841], key installments of which had been presumed lost. It is the most sustained piece of writing from the showman’s early, rough-and-tumble career; a good firm poke in the eye to contemporary sensibilities; and a telling indication of the twinned Jacksonian fantasies of upward mobility for whites and brute status for blacks. Cook leaves out the canonical autobiographies: The Life of P. T. Barnum [1855] and Struggles and Triumphs [1869; frequently updated thereafter]. This may have been the marketing decision of the press, an attempt to avoid competing with its own recent edition of The Life of P. T. Barnum. Still, selections from the autobiographies would have been useful in showing how Barnum squared his growing public stature with the rhythms of American political culture. So: colossal it ain’t, but it is a wonderful composite portrait of a man The Times of London called “an almost classical figure . . . and a typical representative of the age of transparent puffing through which modern democracies are passing” (238).

Book Review: Ready to Wear and Ready to Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New YorkReady to Wear and Ready to Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York. By GreenNancy L.Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997. Pp. 426.

In the late Tudor period, England became an important participant in international affairs; controlling and managing this political shift, particularly when faced with popular perceptions left over from a previous era, was a daunting task. What Yungblut develops in this book is the attempt by Elizabeth and Cecil to recognize and address these new problems. She concisely and convincingly outlines the problems and the methods Elizabeth chose to confront them.