Blurring distinctions between the morally edifying, instructive, and perverse, P.T. Barnum’s American Museum at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in New York was central to the emerging culture of popular entertainment in the 1840s-1860s. Les Harrison estimates that by 1865, forty-one million visitors attended P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York: nearly six million more than the total population of the United States at the conclusion of the Civil War.