This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports and from business to history, and everything in between, including your stories,

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Phineas Taylor Barnum was to the show business what Andrew Jackson had been to politics.

And like Andrew Jackson, he became one of the representative Americans of his time,

an expansive entrepreneur in the great age of entrepreneurs.

In a big and memorable way, he changed how we all lived.

He gave us something to talk about, something to dream about.

Our movies, television, our entire entertainment-saturated culture

is what it is today because of what P.T. Barnum started.

He seems almost a fable now, but then he did in his own day, too.

Here to tell this story is an expert among P.T. Barnum experts.

Let's take a listen.

Tonight, we welcome America's fabulous showman, Vinius Taylor Barnum.

My name is Kathleen Marr. I'm the director of the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

It's about barely an hour outside of New York City,

and it was the home of P.T. Barnum, and the museum that I worked for was actually

incepted by P.T. Barnum before he passed away, but sadly, it took two years to build, and he did not survive to see it completed.

But what I typically

love doing on a regular basis is talking about Barnum and how he's impacted our lives today,

how he has completely designed popular culture the way we move through the world, through

theater, through gaming, everything that you could possibly

think of actually has some form or some fingerprint of Barnum on it because he was a brilliant

...