History: The Birth of America in 1882

This article concerns a New York Times story about the birth of the female Asian elephant calf, named America, at the winter headquarters of the Greatest Show on Earth in Bridgeport, Connecticut on February 2, 1882. Phineas T. Barnum, one of the owners of the show, and one prone to self-aggrandizing bluster, claimed that America was the second elephant ever born in captivity. America was born only to months before the arrival in New York of the most famous circus elephant of all time, Jumbo, on Easter Sunday, 1882, and only two years before the origin of a small wagon circus run by the five Ringling (originally, Rüngeling) brothers from Baraboo Wisconsin