What images does the term "human zoo" conjure up? It's almost a guarantee that the truth was much worse. Human zoos were exactly that — zoos and exhibitions where humans were on display, oftentimes in their "natural habitats." (It's worth noting right now that there's going to be a lot of words in quotation marks here, because we're going to have to call people things like "specimens" and "savages"... like, a lot.)

According to the BBC, many human zoos were filled with "specimens" (see — just like that) from countries and territories that had been colonized by Europeans. Hundreds of thousands of people — particularly in the late 19th century — visited these zoos, and what went on there was very much like you might expect if it were lions or zebras behind those bars. Visitors would stare and sometimes, says DW, they were allowed to touch the "exhibits": stroking their hair, sniffing them... so yes, it was more terrible than you're imagining at first.

Many people were kidnapped and sold to zoos, while others were told half-truths to get them to volunteer. And many of them died there. Here's more on the horrifying truth of human zoos.

Zoos are one of those things that are highly polarizing: there are some who say no animal should be kept on display behind bars, and there are others who think it's perfectly fine if they're cared for — and especially if they're endangered, and keeping them in captivity is going to give the species another chance.

To that end, zoos have come a long way. Visit one now, and you're likely to see animals confined with invisible ditches, surrounded by trees and plants (or rocks and sand, depending on the animal). That kind of natural environment was the brainchild of one man: Carl Hagenbeck. DW calls him the man who invented the modern zoo... but there's a catch to his legacy. 

Hagenbeck was a rare and exotic animal trader, and he was also the first to add a human element to his shows, says research from the Universidad Complutense. In 1874, he organized an exhibit that included some reindeer and Sámi peoples (who are the indigenous people of Lapland). It wasn't just about the people: he included some traditional dwellings, tools, and foods, too. From there, it wasn't long before zoo directors realized they could have people stage ritual dances and ceremonies, sing traditional songs, and do day-to-day activities... and other people would come to watch.

Carl Hagenbeck may have been the first to create zoo exhibits featuring humans, but the idea of displaying people for some large-scale entertainment goes back a long way — to at least the 15th century. That, says Understanding Prejudice, is when Christopher Columbus brought Native Americans back to Europe with him, writing: "They should be good servants [...] I [...] will take hence [...] six natives for Your Highness." Those people were then paraded through the streets of major Spanish cities like Seville and Barcelona.

Then, there were people like Sarah Baartman (pictured), who was born in 1789 and exhibited across Europe as the "Hottentot Venus." According to the BBC, she had a medical condition called steatopygia, which resulted in prominent buttocks: she was dressed in skin-tight clothing, visitors were invited to stare, and during private shows, they were even allowed to touch her. She died in 1815, and her skeleton, sex organs, and brain were put on display until 1974. 

From there, it was only a short hop, skip, and a jump to full-blown exhibits that CNRS News says included any people deemed "exotic" by the same European cities that prided themselves on their modern thinking. Cities like Brussels, London, and Hamburg exhibited people from Egypt, Korean, and from across Africa. Some exhibits even had signs like the one in an 1897 Brussels exhibit that warned: "Do not feed the Congolese. They have been fed."

In case your only experience with the history of P.T. Barnum was The Greatest Showman, it's worth mentioning that the real Barnum was a pretty shady sort of character. He got in on the whole idea of exhibiting people pretty early, at the expense of a slave named Joice Heth.

In 1835, Barnum went on tour with Heth, claiming she was the 161-year-old former nursemaid to George Washington. According to The Lost Museum Archive, ticket sales boomed for around seven months, and for that entire time, Heth was on display 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (via Wiley Online). And don't worry, it gets worse. When ticket sales started to decline, Barnum penned an anonymous letter to a Boston paper: Heth was a fake! Not just a fake, it claimed, but she was a machine, cobbled together from whale bones and covered with old leather. 

Already think he went too far? He went farther. When Heth died in 1836, Barnum rented Broadway's City Saloon and sold tickets to her autopsy, and the idea was that he was going to prove her age and her story. The fact that New York surgeon Dr. David L. Rogers found (via Online MedEd) that she was only about 75 to 80-years-old and the story wasn't true wasn't a problem for Barnum: he simply claimed the autopsy was done on the wrong body, and the real Heth was alive and well.

Just like Carl Hagenbeck promoted the idea of exhibiting animals in enclosures similar to their native environments, there was a sad attempt made to do the same in human zoos. For example, says DW, those in the Egyptian enclosure would often share their space with camels, and in the background, there would be cardboard backdrops and papier-mâché pyramids. Just... like... home?

Similarly, members of African tribes would have huts to live in and bones to put in their hair, while Laplanders sat alongside reindeer. Historian Hilke Thode-Arora explained: "Carl Hagenbeck sold visitors an illusion of world travel with his human zoos."

And while there may have been weak attempts at making an exhibit look like home, it definitely wasn't — a fact that became painfully clear when "specimens" began to die. Poor working conditions and the steady flow of visitors meant that people were exposed to a ton of illnesses that they had no natural immunity to. Entire exhibits succumbed to illness: in 1880, an Inuit family — who hadn't been vaccinated against smallpox — contracted the disease and died, while measles, pneumonia, and consumption killed an entire group of Sioux. The trend continued.

Where did all of these people come from? It varied — some were plucked right from their homelands and taken halfway across the world. The Guardian, for example, describes Belgium as "importing" 267 people from Congo to be put on display in one of their zoos. Sometimes it was against their will and sometimes they were given a vague idea of what they would be doing — and a promise they'd be allowed to go home (via Rhode Island College). Other times, well...

Let's take the story of Theodor Wonja Michael. His mother was from East Prussia and his father was from Cameroon. At the end of the 19th century, the whole family moved to Berlin. When his father couldn't find a regular job, he turned to doing the only thing he could to support his family: agreeing to be displayed in a human zoo. And there were a lot — DW says Germany alone had about 400 of them.

When Michael's mother died, it was ruled that his father could no longer care for him and his siblings, so they were put into foster care. With whom? The owners of a human zoo officially became their foster parents, and the siblings were split up and included in various exhibits showing "a typical African lifestyle." He went on to write a book about his experiences, saying of his foster parents, "Their only interest in us was for our labor."

It wasn't just the colonial powers of Europe that delighted in the staging of a good human zoo, and the biggest of them all was at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. Around 10,000 people were brought in to play a part in the zoo, and exhibits included "Patagonians" from the Andes, Ainu from Japan, "pygmies" from Africa, and don't worry, North America was represented, too, with 51 of the First Nations there. Among them? Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce leader who had seen the massacre and starvation of his tribe (via Biography), and the Apache leader, Geronimo. Can't get worse? We'll take that bet and raise you: part of Geronimo's daily routine was posing for photos with visitors and playing the part of Sitting Bull in reenactments of the Battle of Little Bighorn.

One massive section — 47 acres, to be precise — was turned into a "Philippine Reservation," and remember, the US had been involved in a war with the Philippines that had only ended 2 years before. That sort of explains why it was the responsibility of the US War Department (and then-military-governor of the Philippines and future president William H. Taft) to gather around 1,400 Filipinos for the exhibit. The message, says Lapham's Quarterly, was clear: These are the people conquered in the name of white progress.

An estimated 99 of every 100 people who attended the World's Fair visited the "reservation."

Ota Benga was born around 1883 in Congo and eventually got married and started a family. But he was still young when everything changed — he returned from hunting to find his village massacred. He was captured and sold into slavery, catching the attention of S.P. Verner, who was in Africa collecting people for the human zoos of the St. Louis World's Fair. He bought Ota Benga — along with seven others — and took them to St. Louis where they were put on exhibition... as, Lapham's Quarterly adds, cannibals.

When Verner started having financial difficulties, the Smithsonian says he made arrangements for his young charge to go live at first the American Museum of Natural History then the Bronx Zoo. For a while, Benga helped out with the animals... until the powers that be hit upon the idea of displaying him in the Monkey House with the chimpanzees. Yes, it was totally controversial, with the Reverend James H. Gordon writing (via The Guardian), "We are frank enough to say we do not like this exhibition [...] We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls."

Still, it continued until a confrontation between Ota Benga and a keeper: then, he went to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum and eventually moved to Lynchburg, Virginia. There, he made friends, regaled the children with stories, and in 1916, killed himself after sinking into depression.

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.

It's unclear how many people were exhibited in human zoos over the decades, but it's the stories of the individuals that are more telling than numbers. Individuals like Minik Wallace. According to Rhode Island College, he, his father, Qisuk, and four others were moved from Northern Greenland to New York's Museum of Natural History in 1897, part of the spoils of an expedition by Robert Peary. They were kept in a basement at least some of the time. One by one, they began to succumb to tuberculosis.

Minik's father was the first one to die, and Minik wanted to perform a traditional funeral. There was a catch: the museum wanted to keep Qisuk's body for study. Not about to let decency and the wishes of an orphaned boy get in the way, they created a fake body, added some rocks to the coffin, and went ahead with the "funeral."

Once Minik was the only surviving member of his little group, he was adopted by museum official William Wallace. At the same time he was raised at Wallace's estate, it also the site of the preparing, defleshing, and mounting of Qisuk's skeleton. Why? So he could be displayed at the museum. Minik did, indeed, discover what happened to his father, and while he returned to Greenland briefly, he resolved to get his father's remains repatriated. He went back to the US in 1916 but died during the flu epidemic of 1918, before he succeeded in his quest.

It goes without saying that the entire premise of the human zoo was built on extreme racism, but at the time, there was more to it than that. Sometimes, the exhibits were described as "ethnological expositions," giving them a little bit of science cred. (Ferris State University's Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia points out that they were often called "Negro villages," too, just in case the whole racism thing wasn't 100 percent clear.) Many were organized by people who used them as an opportunity to cement their own ideas about eugenics. Ota Benga, for example, was displayed with a sign — put there by socialite and eugenicist Madison Grant — that identified him as "The Missing Link." See, science!

According to CNRS News, these zoos were a favorite place for a certain type of anthropologist. Namely, these were the ones that were working on theories of biological racism, which basically suggested there were distinct physical differences between races that made some inferior and others superior.

For a while, human zoos were seen as a great place for scientists to take measurements and observe "specimens" of various races, but that sort of fell out of favor by the 1880s... and not because people started to realize there was something terribly wrong about it all. Nope — they were raising "doubts about the representative nature of the people displayed in enclosures."

The late 19th century was a period of extensive colonialism, and the human zoos played a huge role in the public perception on how it was perfectly acceptable for European powers to go stampeding into other countries, planting flags, and declaring that they were in charge.

According to CNRS News, human zoos went a long way to selling the idea that some countries just needed a guiding, European hand, because on their own? "Look at these people. Clearly, they're savages and are much better off as a colony." We're paraphrasing, of course, but that was the idea. It helped white people feel superior, and it made them feel better about the atrocities that were being committed in the name of civilization and advancement. 

And this wasn't just something happening in Europe. In the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, Lapham's Quarterly says slavery was on full display. At a time when Jim Crow laws were in full swing and segregation was still the norm, the only place Black Americans were represented was in a human zoo exhibit called the "Old Plantation." There, actors staged religious revivals, worked in the garden, and sang songs about how wonderful it was to be a slave. Human zoos helped people believe that atrocities and racism weren't so atrocious after all.

Surely, human zoos were super olde-timey, right? Not quite. The world's last official human zoo was staged at the 1958 World's Fair in Belgium.

At the time, Congo was a Belgian colony, and they saw the fair as an opportunity to show off what The Guardian says they described as "a special bond," by setting up a "typical" Congolese village where men, women, and children went about their "typical" day... while being relentlessly mocked. Often, visitors threw bananas at them. The entire thing, says NPR, was actually an extension of a similar zoo, where King Leopold II kept a few hundred people on display at his country estate in Tervuren.

That horrible bit of history is only overshadowed by Belgium's history in Congo, defined by a king who ordered his soldiers to turn entire villages into slave labor camps. While women were held hostage, the men were forced to go and gather wild rubber. If they didn't gather enough? The soldiers would cut off the hands or feet of the offending slave's children. Special bond, indeed.

Human zoos have left a strange legacy behind. Take St. Louis. There's a neighborhood there called Dogtown, a nickname that was given because, says Lapham's Quarterly, of the rumor that it was a favorite area for the residents of the Philippine Reservation. Why? It was said that they liked to eat dog, and Dogtown was supposedly where they got the unlucky dogs.

There's another huge problem too: the remains of those who died so very far from home. In 1881, German authorities took 11 Kawésqar from Chile and exhibited them in a human zoo. Five were dead by 1882, and it wasn't until 2010 that their remains were returned to Chile and their ancestral hunting and fishing grounds (via Guelph Mercury).

According to Hyperallergic, the movement to repatriate the remains of indigenous people only started gathering momentum in the 1980s, and it's been shockingly difficult. Even when the remains are in the Smithsonian it can take a long time, partially because they're not sure what they have. It was only when they were sorting through collections around the establishment of the National Museum of the American Indian in 1989 that they realized they had brain fragments from a man named Ishi, who died while on display at the University of California's Museum of Anthropology. He didn't get home until 2000. And remember Minik, the little boy who attended a fake burial for his father? It took until 1993 to have his father's remains returned to Greenland.

When P.T. Barnum's name comes up these days, it's mostly for one of two reasons. Either A: because that the guy you know who uses the word "actually" too often wants to show everyone how smart he is by informing them that Barnum never said "there's a sucker born every minute," or B: because your coworker just saw The Greatest Showman and is totally shipping Zac Efron and Zendaya, or Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson, or one of the elephants and it doesn't matter who else, they just have a lot of feelings.

It may shock and amaze audiences far and wide to learn that the real P.T. Barnum was a spectacle far more astounding than the optimistic songbird presented on screen in The Greatest Showman. Step up, dear reader, and learn his story! Not just an entrepreneurial spirit, he was an American legend, a nonfiction folk hero, a demigod of gumption and wherewithal who walked among mortals and forever changed the landscape of entertainment!

Or depending on your perspective, he was a con artist slave owner who got an elephant killed. Let's explore P.T. Barnum.

First things first. P.T. Barnum was, if nothing else, a deeply dishonest man who made a living off the gullibility of the public. That said, he came by his dishonesty honestly.

Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in 1810 and named after his grandfather, who almost immediately started screwing with him. At his grandson's christening, he gave the boy the deed to 5 acres of land called Ivy Island. Years of playing it up to the boy (and years of the boy telling everyone in town how rich he was) culminated in a trip to Ivy Island, which it turned out was less "magical isle of wonderment and possibility" and more "a patch of land in a swamp covered in acres of poison oak." Oh, how everyone laughed at him. According to his autobiography, he was 10 at the time.

This sounds like the origin story of an Adam West-era Batman villain, and to be clear, it basically was. It was, however, a slow burner: The road to becoming the patron saint of hucksters was a long one, and before getting into show business, Barnum would work in nobler fields, like as a sketchy boardinghouse employee, a newspaper publisher who was convicted of libel, and perhaps most successfully, the manager of a local lottery. When lotteries became illegal in his home state of Connecticut, he packed up his family and headed to New York.

And that, roughly, is where stuff started to get gross.

Just ask any of the No Doz-riddled optimists who camp out on the sidewalk for a week trying to get an audition for America's Got Talent: breaking into show business is hard. Luckily for P.T. Barnum, there are ways around that, provided you're willing to be biblical-grade evil.

At the tender age of 25, Barnum was looking to get his foot in the door of pretty much anything. He was working as part owner of a grocery store when he came across Joice Heth, an elderly (here comes the problematic stuff!) slave. The roughly 80-year-old woman was being exhibited as the 161-year-old ex-nurse to baby George Washington, but for whatever reason, people weren't buying the act.

That's where Barnum stepped in. Reckoning that selling the public on a century-and-a-half-old woman was more about branding than common sense, he circumvented the whole "it was illegal to buy slaves in New York at that point" issue by "leasing" Joice. He sold his stake in the grocery store, paid $500 out of pocket, borrowed another 500, and became the proud owner of a person.

Weirdly for a story about buying and selling human beings with thoughts and emotions, things got a little bleak from there.

Physically, there's no doubt that Joice Heth looked like an old woman when P.T. Barnum started exhibiting her, but she just wasn't the spectacle that he needed. Audiences up until that point had been unimpressed. So what do you do with a curiosity act that nobody's curious about? If you're P.T. Barnum, you go full-on evil sideshow proprietor and start torturing an old woman.

For starters, Barnum wanted Joice to shed some of those pesky extra pounds from which octogenarians so frequently suffer. To achieve this, he put her on a strict diet of eggs and whiskey. He also apparently figured that, while the chances of anyone living for over a century and a half were low, the odds that they could do it and still have teeth were probably astronomical. According to accounts in the Benjamin Reiss book The Showman and the Slave, what happened next went roughly like this: Barnum said, "You'd look older without teeth. You should let me pull those out of you," to which Heth replied, and we're paraphrasing here, "No." Barnum retorted, "Fair enough. How about a drink?" and then got Heth drunk. Really drunk. However drunk you have to be to say "Oh, all right, yank my teeth out."

It's impossible to say for sure why this story didn't make it into The Greatest Showman, but it may have been due to the difficulty inherent in juxtaposing a man mutilating an old woman so she'll better suit his needs against a song about accepting yourself no matter what you look like.

Barnum turned Heth into a touring sensation, and made a killing doing it. By showing her off for 12 hours a day, six days a week, Barnum pulled in around $6,000 per month, precisely zero dollars of which went to Heth. Barnum's methods of advertising were dizzyingly machiavellian: At one point, he had a story printed in a Boston newspaper ahead of a visit claiming that Heth was "a curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, India-rubber, and numbers springs that ingeniously put together, and made to move at the slightest touch according to the will of the operator." If the impossibly old woman who raised the father of our country didn't pique your interest, a terminator made of orca skeletons definitely would.

The exploitation of an enslaved woman in the free North didn't go unnoticed. When people protested what was clearly a violation of the law, Barnum made it known that Heth was actually a free woman and that the proceeds from her appearances went toward freeing her family in the South, and any of the "aw shucks" hokey traveling show charm of Barnum's business flies out the window when you realize that none of it was true.

Joice died within a year of going to work for Barnum. Consummate entrepreneur that he was, this didn't stop him: He held a public autopsy of her body and charged 50 cents for tickets.

A year of starving an old lady and forcing her to work until she died left Barnum bitten by the showbiz bug. His next venture was called Barnum's Grand Scientific and Musical Theater. It was a traveling variety show featuring magicians, acrobats, and curiosities.

At this early phase in his career, however, his greatest success came when he met Charles Stratton. Stratton was a 5-year-old boy from Connecticut who had apparently stopped growing at around 6 months old. Barnum convinced Stratton's parents to let him take the kid under his wing. He taught Stratton how to perform and took him out on the road, only lying a little bit about how he was older than he actually was and also from England and also named "General Tom Thumb." The ruse brought an audience, and before long, Stratton was performing for Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln.

Charles Stratton is sort of the poster child for the duality of Barnum's methods. He was a young man with a disability that, at that point in history, would've left him without a lot of options in life, but he wound up a celebrity who died wealthy, beloved, and married, and none of that would've happened without Barnum. On the other hand, Barnum could be seen as someone who exploited a little boy, taught him to drink wine and smoke to amuse audiences, and lest we forget, also bought a woman and pulled her teeth out.

Despite the economic crisis of 1837, Barnum was doing all right for himself. Using the money he'd put together on the road, he purchased Scudder's American Museum, a five-story building in New York that was promptly rebranded as Barnum's American Museum. What had been a hit-and-miss collection of natural history exhibits and curiosities was given the typically over-the-top P.T. Barnum treatment. The building was filled with oddities, performers, and trained animals, and the advertising was just about what you'd expect. Visitors were promised sights such as the mummified "Feejee Mermaid," which was, in theory, the preserved corpse of a cryptid and, in practice, a monkey body sewn to a fish tail. All in all, the museum purportedly saw over 38 million visitors during its more than two decades of operation, a number slightly higher than the population of the United States at the time.

In 1865, Barnum's American Museum burned to the ground while fleeing animals jumped from its windows, trying to escape. No one knows how the fire started, though it's been blamed on a faulty chimney. The good news is that it was insured, though it's hard to say whether that was true of his second museum that burned down in 1868, or his circus that burned down in 1872, or his mansion that burned down in 1857.

During his time running the American Museum and in the years that followed, P.T. Barnum amassed a small battalion of performers with unique and unusual physical attributes. They became some of his most popular attractions, especially once he was done chumming the waters with aggrandizing lies.

The list of Barnum's performers is long and, these days, pretty troublesome. For fans of the truly heinous, there was William Henry Johnson. William was an African American man born to two former slaves. He had a distinctively sloped forehead that may or may not have been the result of microcephaly, so naturally Barnum put him in a gorilla suit from the neck down, told him to speak gibberish, and advertised him as the missing link. If the racist angle isn't gross enough for you, there's always his stage name, "Zip the Pinhead."

There was also Ella Harper the Camel Girl, a woman with knees that bent both ways. There were Chang and Eng, the conjoined brothers who became so well known that they gave birth to the phrase "Siamese twins." And of course, there was Annie Jones, the Bearded Lady, who, and this is neat, spent her later years championing efforts to get people to stop calling folks with physical abnormalities "freaks."

In his autobiography, Barnum claimed to have heard a firebrand minister speaking in 1847 on the subject of temperance. He said he became convinced of the potential evils of alcohol and famously expressed that he would "never drink anything stronger than water" when he spoke publicly about the importance of a booze-free lifestyle. This lent credibility to his constant deluge of shenanigans and made him, at the time, a more admirable political figure.

Whether Barnum actually believed this is, like literally everything else about him, up for some debate. According to the Greeley Tribune, he owned property in Greeley, then a dry city, but his property was nearly confiscated after it was busted twice for unlawful hooch sales while under the management of Barnum's in-laws.

And then there was the elephant in the room: Jumbo, Barnum's prize elephant and the reason we use the word "jumbo" to this day. Whatever Barnum's thoughts on alcohol, Jumbo apparently loved it, and was given entire kegs of beer to drink at a time, sort of visually prophesying John Belushi in a lot of ways. Adorable? Sure. But it was also very possibly a contributing factor to the animal's physical deterioration. Studies have found that Jumbo's diet led to deformities and infections in his teeth, potentially worsening the animal's infamous episodes of violent rage.

Overall, P.T. Barnum is remembered as a jovial sort of a guy, grinning his way through a life of puckish misdirection and, lest we forget, buying people and pulling their teeth out. But there was one thing the showman couldn't stand: liars.

With righteousness and the wellbeing of the public doubtless stoking the fires behind his every keystroke, Barnum wrote "The Humbugs of the World: An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits and Deceivers Generally, in All Ages," and based on the title, was paid by the word. In it, he outlines the different ways that spiritualists, mediums, con artists, and hucksters would defraud the public. He adamantly stood by his belief that taking advantage of people through deception was wrong, saying in a letter, "As a general thing I have not 'duped the world' nor attempted to do so."

He also told people that a monkey sewed to a fish was a mermaid and fabricated a heroic death for his star elephant after negligence led to him being hit by a train, but whatever. He faked a photo of himself with Abraham Lincoln's ghost to help take down "spirit photographers" like William Mumler who skewed more on the totally trashy side of conning folks out of their money.

Barnum, for all of his faults, was a hard working man who didn't take a lot of time off. He didn't actually start the traveling circus he was most famous for until he was in his 60s, so his later years were spent traveling the world. On one of his trips, his wife, Charity, passed away from heart failure. According to Bridgeport History Society records, Barnum was in Germany at the time and decided to travel to England to be with a friend, John Fish, during his time of grief. Thirteen weeks later, he was married to Fish's daughter, Nancy, who was 40 years younger than he was.

In other slightly yucky news, Barnum cut one of his daughters out of his will when she cheated on her husband, presumably because of his intense dislike of (deep sigh) dishonesty. Not having any sons and wanting to keep his legacy alive, he left a good chunk of his money to his grandson on the condition that he use "Barnum" as his last name.

By the time he died, P.T. Barnum was arguably a living folk hero. He had entertained millions, been elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives and to the office of mayor in Bridgeport, and sold countless copies of his memoirs and self-help books. He'd traveled the world in search of the peculiar and incredible, and witnessed people and objects beyond the wildest imaginings of most men. He'd even read his own obituary.

According to P.T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man, Barnum had talked about how newspapers only printed nice things about people after they died. When his health began to decline in 1891, the New York Evening Sun apparently decided to do something about it: They printed a glowing obituary for him while he was still alive, just so he could read it. The front page article was titled "Great and Only Barnum – He Wanted to Read His Obituary – Here It Is."

In the roughly 130 years since he died, P.T. Barnum has become a source of fascination on par with many of his own exhibits. He's been the subject of books, plays, TV movies, and an all-singing, all-dancing, musical Wolverine spectacular.

In the end, maybe the most intriguing thing about Barnum is that he remains impossible to define. His collection of "human curiosities," for example, could be seen as exploitation of the differently abled, yes. It could also be argued that his providing decent-paying work to folks with disabilities meant those people were able to live longer and more comfortably than they otherwise would have in a society with no other support system. His propagation of minstrel shows and sensationalist racial stereotypes are, through a modern lens, xenophobic and hateful. He also rallied hard in favor of the Thirteenth Amendment, arguing that all people, no matter their heritage, possessed an immortal soul and deserved to be free.

Maybe there is no answer to the question "What kind of man was P.T. Barnum?" Maybe, like everyone else, he was a complex hive of actions, positive and negative. To quote James Truslow Adams, "There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us." Maybe a life is too complicated a thing to define as good or evil.

Except Barnum pulled the teeth out of Joice Heth's head and sold tickets to her autopsy, so no, the guy kind of sucked.