From July 30 to October 4, the American Sign Museum will host a new exhibition displaying banners and signs advertising “freaks” and sideshow acts that once dazzled audiences attending traveling ...

They drew the curious and the mocking, and left them entertained and often confused about their attractions. The circus impresario P.T. Barnum earlier had posed Black musicians as from distant Africa, ...

“For years our shows have been PG… 13,” Hayes Carll said early in his long, long, long set Friday night at House of Blues, as he headlined his own “Burlesque Circus & Sideshow Freakout.” “I wanted to ...

The heyday of the circus sideshow act exists in the 21st century as a distant memory, usually preserved by grainy sepia photos and folklore that rarely impresses today’s historical skeptics. Yet, the ...