Under one big tent: American Indians, African Americans and the circus world of nineteenth-century America

My dissertation, "Under One Big Tent: American Indians, African Americans and the Circus World of Nineteenth-Century America," rewrites the history of the Old Northwest and argues that diversity was crucial to community development in this region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This dissertation recovers the story of a different past that has been repeatedly ignored where Indians and blacks not only lived in the Midwest, but also were prominent founders of communities. I contend that both Native and African Americans were as pioneering as the white farmers that encircled them, and that their early and sustained presence encouraged two of the nation's largest circuses to locate in the Midwest. The Sells Brothers Circus and the Great Wallace Circus located in Ohio and Indiana because of a ready pool of low-wage labor and available lands on which its employees could create and sustain communities and raise their families. While this dissertation focuses on reestablishing this forgotten past, my work argues that the circus provided the means for persistence for both Indians and African Americans and provided them the social and economic means to create and sustain robust communities in the nation's heartland.;My research reveals that race and ethnicity in America were not monolithic historical factors shaping community formation. Instead, my research shows how the elites and lower classes of African American and American Indian societies had disparate views about the value of circus labor. African American elites were uncomfortable with circus work, but often viewed the industry as an avenue of uplift. In contrast, leaders of the Society of American Indians viewed such labor as perpetuating primitive images of Native Americans. While both Native and African American entertainers understood the demeaning depictions of race that they performed in the Wild West and minstrel shows of the circus, both groups relied on the higher wages of the industry to sustain their households. But Indians and African Americans differed in their long-term goals. African Americans used circus employment to create educational opportunities for young ragtime and jazz performers which enhanced their mobility, while Indians used access to wage labor to sustain their communities and insure that they remained on or adjacent to their homelands in the Midwest.;I use eighteenth-century missionary and church records, community and oral histories, and treaty negotiations to place Miami, Wyandot, and African American people in the Old Northwest and to show ways that they built and maintained communities. I use nineteenth and twentieth-century Native American and African American newspapers to show the scope of traveling musicians, the challenges they overcame to create spaces for themselves, and how they moved beyond the circus industry to other national and international opportunities. I use circus archives, industry journals, and route books to reconstruct circus towns and life in traveling circus communities.