P.T. Barnum is famous to movie-going audiences as the charming 'Greatest Showman,' but the reality was far more complicated, and much darker. P.T. Barnum's very first foray into showbusiness was purchasing an enslaved woman named Joice Heth, whom he displayed as a public spectacle, promoting her a 161-year-old woman who once nursed George Washington.

SOURCES:
'The Showman and the Slave' by Benjamin Reiss
'Medical Apartheid' by Harriet A. Washington
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-pt-barnum-greatest-humbug-them-all-180967634/
“P.T. Barnum and Africa” Bernth Lindfors 
The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader, edited by James W. Cook

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