What is ShowHistory.com?

The origin of this undertaking emerged in casual conversation between its two founders, James Taylor and D.B. Doghouse, outside The Sarasota Showman’s Club one February evening sometime in 2001. The Showhistory.com website first debuted on February 11, 2002. The plan then, as now, was to engage in the enormous task of listing every novelty, variety, sideshow and freakshow performer who ever crossed the lot, creaked the boards of dime museum or bally, saw sun glint in the eyes of an audience in some small town, waiting for the sound of nickels and dimes clacking into a metal box. Finally expanding to more than a thousand pages of material and hundreds of images, the site was unfortunately mainly inactive after 2006. In October 2014 the site was redesigned and relaunched in a slightly different form– as an online image archive available on a subscription basis. While now you must pay to access the full contents of the site, including our expanding archive of online images (over 1000 at launch), we plan on preserving and re-introducing all of the earlier material, and presenting a large quantity of free-access material. ShowHistory.com plans on eventually making available online for members all of the 11,000-plus item archive of photos, pitchcards, handbills and ephemera in the area of sideshow, novelty and variety, vaudeville, burlesque, dime museums, carnivals, and outdoor show business in general. The earliest item in the collection dates from 1609, and the archive continues to expand to include items from present-day performers and exhibits. Showhistory.com wishes to chronicle the lost, fading and future scene on the fringes of the American amusement business– in biography, history, photographs, and whatever else we can find. Collect the stories before they disappear, push and pull together the conflicting sources in books and memoribilia so that they can coexist in one place. Here we go! On with the show!