AHG Seminar - Remember Bolivar

Bolivar the Elephant (~1861-1908) is an almost forgotten celebrity from America's Gilded Age. Taken from Sri Lanka as a baby, he was made famous as 'the largest living land animal in the world' while on tour with Forepaugh’s Circus 1881-1888. Bolivar was used as a walking billboard during the circus parades, wearing hand-painted banners that advertised the show. He was a physical spectacle, but with no voice of his own, his personality, both wild and tame, was manipulated by his owners to mirror the zeitgeist of the time. Bolivar was used to explore ideas of exceptionalism, commercialism, assimilation, morality, folk-law and heroism throughout the 1800s. In this way Bolivar is both a real and imagined animal; a chimera used as a lens for focussing the foundational principles of 'Americaness' after the Civil War. Tracking Bolivar's life, mirrored my own understanding of America in the build up to today's cultural reckoning.