The most prevalent character clown in the American circus is the hobo, tramp or bum clown.

According to American circus expert Hovey Burgess, they are ( in order of class ):

* 1863 – Charles Ringling, American circus owner ( d. 1926 )

* 1936 – John Ringling, American circus owner ( b. 1866 )

* 1898 – Emmett Kelly, American circus clown ( d. 1979 )

* 1847 – James Anthony Bailey, American circus ringmaster ( d. 1906 )

It starred his wife, Lyubov Orlova ( an operatic singer who had also appeared in The Jolly Fellows ) as an American circus performer who has to immigrate to the USSR from the U. S. because she has a mixed race child, whom she had with a black man.

* 12-Chappie Fox, 90, American circus historian.

** Pinto Colvig, American vaudeville actor, radio actor, newspaper cartoonist, prolific movie voice actor, and circus performer ( original voice of Goofy ) ( b. 1892 )

* March 22 – Karl Wallenda, American circus performer ( b. 1905 )

* September 11 – Pinto Colvig, American vaudeville actor, radio actor, newspaper cartoonist, prolific movie voice actor, and circus performer ( original voice of Goofy ) ( d. 1967 )

* January 4 – General Tom Thumb, American circus performer and entertainer ( d. 1883 )

Other traditions are represented, such as Chinese acrobatics schools, and traditional circus families that are often Latin American or European.

Ball began writing American Beauty as a play in the early 1990s, partly inspired by the media circus around the Amy Fisher trial in 1992.

* Victor Pépin, the first American circus master

Emmett Leo Kelly ( December 9, 1898-March 28, 1979 ) was an American circus performer, who created the memorable clown figure " Weary Willie ", based on the hobos of the Depression era.

North American stand-up comedy has its roots in various traditions of popular entertainment of the late 19th century including vaudeville, English Music Hall, Minstrel shows, humorist monologues by personalities such as Mark Twain and Norman Wilkerson, and circus clown antics.

Somers is known for being the " cradle of the American circus ".

Somers was in a minor dispute with Baraboo, Wisconsin, over which community is the " birthplace " of the American circus.

Phineas Taylor Barnum ( July 5, 1810 – April 7, 1891 ) was an American showman, businessman, scam artist and entertainer, remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and for founding the circus that became the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

The Zoo's original animal collection consisted of eight monkeys, two Grizzly Bears, three White-tailed Deer, six raccoons, two elk, an American Bison, a Spotted Hyena, an American Alligator, a circus elephant, a tiger and over four hundred birds, which included a crow.

A media circus ensued, with Smith being interviewed by Ted Koppel and Johnny Carson, among others, and with nightly reports by the major American networks.

March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971 ) was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of " deviant and marginal people ( dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers ) or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal .".

The phrase " jump on the bandwagon " first appeared in American politics in 1848 when Dan Rice, a famous and popular circus clown of the time, used his bandwagon and its music to gain attention for his political campaign appearances.

Commenting on the earlier stage, the Notre Dame Chapter of the American Association of University Professors ( in a recent report on the question of faculty participation in administrative decision-making ) noted that the term `` teacher-employee '' ( as opposed to, e.g., `` maintenance employee '' ) was a not inapt description.

Many songs have used this term, including the American patriotic songs " America, The Beautiful " and " God Bless the USA ".

' American ' is derived from America, a term originally denoting all of the New World ( also called " the Americas ").

The Spanish term norteamericano ( North American ), is frequently used to refer things and persons from the United States, but this term can also denote people and things from Canada, and the rest of North America.

English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, and Russian speakers may use the term American to refer to either inhabitants of the Americas or to U. S. nationals.

They generally have other terms specific to U. S. nationals, such as German US-Amerikaner, French étatsunien, Japanese 米国人 beikokujin, Arabic أمريكاني amriikaanii ( as opposed to the more-common أمريكي amriikii ), and Italian statunitense, but these may be less common than the term American.

Latin Americans also may employ the term norteamericano ( North American ), which conflates the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Roser Segimon was the wealthy widow of Josep Guardiola, an Indiano, a term applied locally to the Catalans returning from the American colonies with tremendous wealth.

The term was popularized by G. L. Trager and Bernard Bloch in a 1941 paper on English phonology and went on to become part of standard usage within the American structuralist tradition.

In other instances, it either shares a term with American English, as with truck ( UK: lorry ) or eggplant ( UK: aubergine ), or sometimes with British English, as with mobile phone ( US: cell phone ) or bonnet ( US: hood ).

However, some immigrants from African, Caribbean, Central American and South American nations, and their descendants, may be identified or self-identify with the term.

The Dictionary of Politics: Selected American and Foreign Political and Legal Terms defines the term Alford plea as: " A plea under which a defendant may choose to plead guilty, not because of an admission to the crime, but because the prosecutor has sufficient evidence to place a charge and to obtain conviction in court.

* Red brass is both an American term for the copper-zinc-tin alloy known as gunmetal, and an alloy which is considered both a brass and a bronze.

* Yellow brass is an American term for 33 % zinc brass.

The term " black-letter law " is also used commonly in the American legal system to mean well-established case law.

Big Dipper is the American term for the seven brightest stars of Ursa Major, called the Plough in Britain.

The first recorded use of the term is in a 1964 letter by Anne Ewing to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

William Safire considered this the coinage, but the Random House Dictionary of American Slang considers the usage " metaphorical or perhaps proverbial, rather than a concrete example of the later slang term ", and Popik likewise does not consider this the coinage.

As a result, in North America, the term " black people " is not an indicator of skin color but of socially based racial classification related to being African American, with a history related to institutionalized slavery.

The term baccalaureus is a pun combining the prosaic baccalarius with bacca lauri ' " laurel berry "— according to the American Heritage Dictionary, " bacca " is the Old Irish word for " farmer " + laureus, " laurel berry ," the idea being that a " baccalaureate " had farmed ( cultivated ) his mind.

" The term was sufficiently prevalent that during the year's Presidential campaign, most notably with Democratic party nominee Jimmy Carter describing himself as " born again " in the first Playboy magazine interview of an American Presidential candidate.

The political scientist Michael Barkun discussing the usage of this term in contemporary American culture holds that a conspiracy theory is a belief which explains an event as the result of a secret plot by exceptionally powerful and cunning conspirators to achieve a malevolent end.

Social critics have adopted this term to refer to how the synthesis of paranoid conspiracy theories, which were once limited to American fringe audiences, has given them mass appeal and enabled them to become commonplace in mass media, thereby inaugurating an unrivaled period of people actively preparing for apocalyptic millenarian scenarios in the United States of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.