Rolling in John Dough
On Friday evening, I'll speak at the Munchkin Convention in Princeton, New Jersey, about John Dough and the Cherub, L. Frank Baum's fantasy novel for 1906.
More peculiarly, I plan to speak about the roots of this book in:
- the European folktale classified as Aarne-Thompson 2025, "The Runaway Pancake"
- displays of premature babies at Coney Island
- the polygenist theory of human evolution
- Baum's last steady job, as editor of the trade magazine The Show Window, devoted to shop displays and merchandising
- whether in 1906 Americans knew that the Wright brothers had invented the airplane
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