Backstage at the Ringling Brothers Circus, 1977

On May 17, 1884, in a stunt concocted by the great New York huckster P. T. Barnum, a pack of elephants, with the celebrity pachyderm Jumbo bringing up the rear, famously paraded over the Brooklyn Bridge, which was just a year old, to prove that it was, indeed, safe for human traffic. At the time, circuses in America were enjoying what might be called their golden age: in the course of the preceding hundred years, they had evolved from small equestrian shows featuring the occasional clown into mammoth productions that crisscrossed the country’s shiny new railroads and paraded into town with acrobats and animals, glitter and feathers and fantasies. In an era of overweening ambition and impossible feats (the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge among them), Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth must have seemed like an apparition from a realm of extreme human possibility. By the end of the nineteenth century, the circus was the most popular form of entertainment in the U.S.