Inseparable : the original Siamese twins and their rendezvous with American history

The Resource Inseparable : the original Siamese twins and their rendezvous with American history

Label

Inseparable : the original Siamese twins and their rendezvous with American history

Title remainder

the original Siamese twins and their rendezvous with American history

Statement of responsibility

Yunte Huang

Language

eng

Summary

A portrait of nineteenth-century conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker describes their rise from savvy side-show celebrities to wealthy Southern gentry and discusses how their experiences reflected America's historical penchant for objectifying differences
"With wry humor, Shakespearean profundity, and trenchant insight, Yunte Huang brings to life the story of America's most famous nineteenth-century Siamese twins. Nearly a decade after his triumphant Charlie Chan biography, Yunte Huang returns with this long-awaited portrait of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), twins conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, who were "discovered" in Siam by a British merchant in 1824. Bringing an Asian American perspective to this almost implausible story, Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy showmen who gained their freedom and traveled the backroads of rural America to bring "entertainment" to the Jacksonian mobs. Their rise from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not just another sensational biography but a Hawthorne-like excavation of America's historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal, for tyrannizing the "other"--a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself." -- Publisher's description

Biography type

individual biography

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

QM691.B86

LC item number

H83 2018

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

NLM call number

WZ 100

Context

Context of Inseparable : the original Siamese twins and their rendezvous with American history

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Context