This post is by Amanda Bellows, Bernard and Irene Schwartz Fellow.
During the nineteenth century, literature became increasingly accessible to Americans thanks to rising literacy rates, decreasing production costs, and advancements in print and distribution technologies. In 1871, Appleton’s Journal of Literature pronounced that recreational reading had become “the most facile distraction, the most available entertainment of our day.”[1] American readers delighted in choosing from an array of illustrated periodicals that circulated widely. Publications like Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper were two of the most popular thanks to their vivid pictures, entertaining stories, and engaging commentary on current events.
The New-York Historical Society houses collections of Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper as well as countless other images in its Leslie Dorsey Collection of Pictorial Clippings, Caricature and Cartoon File, and Subject File. Researchers searching for evidence of the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans viewed their world will find that these engravings and lithographs are essential primary sources.
As a scholar of cultural representations of African American slaves and Russian serfs, I pored over these materials in an effort to locate and categorize images of African Americans produced after the abolition of American slavery in 1865. In doing so, I discovered a range of depictions that reveal the diverse ways in which white Americans conceived of former slaves during the post-emancipation era.
Consider, for instance, the nostalgic portrayal of slavery in the Harper’s Monthly illustration, “In Ole Virginny” (1876).
Representations of African American freedpeople differed significantly from concurrent depictions of happy, contented slaves. Many illustrators mocked black freedpeople’s attempts to self-govern by portraying them as incapable of managing their own lives. For instance, the Northern lithographic firm Currier and Ives produced numerous cartoons that ridiculed black Americans in its “Darktown” Series.
In “The Darktown Fire Brigade – All on Their Mettle” (1889), a group of black firefighters from an all-black town rushes off to fight a fire. Portrayed as possessing exaggerated, racialized facial features, the men hurry to the scene of the fire in a chaotic mob.
[1] Henry T. Tuckerman, “Literature of Fiction, III. Traits and Influence,” Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and Art 6, no. 4, November 4, 1871, page 136.
Have a old lithograph,The Lime Kiln Club