The Man behind the Dancing Bear

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"The Man behind the Dancing Bear" is a historical essay about the life of her great-grandfather who came to America with his own Dancing Bear. We will discover more than 90 showmen performing with their dancing bears on the roads of yesteryear. They are introduced through documents attesting their arrival and their wanderings are related in the form of brief biographies, notes and anecdotes based on important personal documentation like of-ship manifests, circus data, newspapers, census, church and military records-excerpts from these records illustrate the book. What surprises us in the history of these showmen is that everything happened in a short time frame at the turn of the 20th century. Even more surprisingly, these circus men all came from three small neighboring villages in the French Pyrenees.