Betsy Golden Kellem · The Public Domain Review · 2021
Circassian Beauty in the American Sideshow
Among the “human curiosities” in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum was a supposed escapee from an Ottoman harem, a figure marketed as both the pinnacle of white beauty and an exoticised other.
Why we picked it
This visual history shows how entertainment, racial classification, beauty standards, and fabricated biography converged in a durable American stereotype.
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