Carl Hagenbeck's empire of entertainments

About this book

"The name Carl Hagenbeck is as evocative in Europe as P. T. Barnum and Walt Disney are in North America. Hagenbeck was the nineteenth century's foremost animal trader and ethnographic showman, known for his enormously popular displays of people, animals, and artifacts gathered from all corners of the globe. The culmination of Hagenbeck's commercial ventures was the opening of his Tierpark near Hamburg in 1907, a dazzling assemblage of constructed exotic environments inhabited by humans and animals." "Eric Ames shows that Hagenbeck's various enterprises illustrate a significant evolution in popular culture. Earlier display forms relied on the collection and presentation of "authentic" artifacts and living beings - the panorama, the zoological garden, the ethnographic collection. These gave rise to the self-consciously synthetic forms of entertainment that we now associate with theme parks and films." "Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments locates Hagenbeck's myriad enterprises in the context of colonialism and nascent globalization; ethnography and anthropology; zoological gardens and international expositions; museum culture and visual spectacle; and consumerism and immersive entertainments. Ames offers a vivid reconstruction of the impulses and contradictions that lay behind the visual and display culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book will intrigue anyone interested in the history of popular entertainments from zoos, museums, panoramas, world's fairs, cinema, and theme parks to Wild West Shows."--BOOK JACKET.