Hugh Jackman’s biopic of P.T. Barnum, “The Greatest Showman,” was released late in 2017 to record breaking box office success.  And while no one expects complete factuality from a biopic, many critics have been rightly alarmed by how the show “whitewashes” Barnum’s troubling relationship with the human side show “curiosities” that made him famous.   …

In 1875 F.O. Vaille and H.A. Clark collected and published The Harvard Book, a two-volume series of historical, biographical, and descriptive sketches profusely illustrated with 75 fine heliotype plates and many wood engravings. These two huge leather-bond, gold-embossed volumes were a gift from the late Edith Maream Stebbins, a member of the First Unitarian Universalist Parish in Milton, Massachusetts.…