Dresden Zoo 1897--Humans as Exhibits in Zoos and "Zoological Gardens"--Ptak Science Books.

This woodcut depicts the “Patagonian” Indians displayed in the Dresden Zoological Gardens. They lived in a fenced exhibit (and allowed to wear clothing), and were shown is all aspects of their daily lives. The curious would come and hang around at the perimeter fences (visible in the lower left of the hunting scene), and gawk, or study, or perhaps help themselves feel better or more superior by watching people in cages live their lives. I don’t know what they were really thinking or feeling. People weren't thinking when they were looking, paying to look, at captive humans on display for many years.

The questionable P.T. Barnum made his "contribution" to 19th century disgraces in 1835 with his exposition of a black slave (Joice Heth) who was supposed to be the world's oldest living human, bringing this sort of behavior to early and high entrepreneurial exposure. Soon after there would fellow his imitators, establishing human occupants in zoos in Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, and Warsaw, and other places, all by the 1870's. There would be spectacles of human "exotics" in the semi-rarefied atmosphere of world fairs and expositions in Paris (1878,1889, 1931), Marseilles (Colonial Expo in 1906), Barcelona, Stuttgart (1928), among others. I should point out that there was a display of an entire Congolese Village as late as the 1958 Fair in Belgium.