A cabinet card photograph of a Pike’s Peak donkey bearing a sign reading: “I Helped to Build Pikes Peak Rail!” The donkey is loaded down with a crate of explosives, a variety of axes, shovels, a can of water or gas, and more. The Pike’s Peak railroad was under construction.....
A scarce cabinet card portrait of an early Jubilee troupe in New Orleans, founded to save an orphanage that was established by a Union general during the Civil War and that later became a premier college-prep high school for Black students. The University Singers of New Orleans pose in two.....
A striking cabinet card photo of Eskimo impersonator Miss Olof Krarer in a polar bear fur outfit, complete with conical hat, posing with a stuffed white fox against a faux ice background. Olof Krarer (1858-1935), an achondroplastic dwarf, was born in northern Iceland, emigrated to Manitoba, Canada with her father.....
![Item #10416 [Cabinet card portrait of Frederick Douglass.]. FREDERICK DOUGLASS, George Kendall...](https://jamesarsenault.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/10416_1.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1788556802)
One of three known photographs of Douglass taken by George Kendall Warren, and the best-known image of the three, having served as the basis for the frontispiece in the first edition of Douglass’s The Life and Times (1881). The editors of Picturing Frederick Douglass note that the portrait “has Douglass.....
![Item #10494 [Cabinet card photograph of Frederick Douglass.]. FREDRICK DOUGLASS, John Howe Kent,...](https://jamesarsenault.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/10494_1.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1788562442)
The earliest and best-known of three photographs of Douglass taken by Rochester photographer John Howe Kent, likely dating from Douglass’s November 3rd, 1882 visit to the city to lecture at Washington Hall, which was near Kent’s studio. This photograph served as the basis for the frontispieces of Douglass’s Life and.....
![Item #8895 [Zulu woman and child.]. Charles Eisenmann, photog](https://jamesarsenault.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/8895_1.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1737029824)
A scarce Eisenmann carte-de-visite photograph showing a Zulu woman and child and capitalizing on American fascination with Zulus following the death of Prince Napoleon and capture of King Cetshwayo in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. This photograph shows a young woman wearing beads and a knee-length, belted fur dress. One.....
A sweet photo of a handsome Black boy on a donkey, intended to riff on a popular comic trope, although we find no trace of humor in the image. North Carolina photographer Thomas Lindsey included this photo in the “Character and Comic” section of his Western North Carolina views: “In.....
A remarkable documentary photo, taken from the top of a train car in Fort Gibson, Indian Territory, capturing the diverse crowd assembled during the disbursement of “strip money”—compensation from the U.S. Government to eligible members of the Cherokee Nation for ceding, under pressure, the Cherokee strip to white settlement. The.....
![Item #7551 [Signed cabinet card portrait of Millie-Christine.]. photog Wendt, Frank](https://jamesarsenault.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/7551_1.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1673285983)
A photo of the celebrated conjoined twins Millie-Christine shown here aged about thirty-five, the two dressed and styled identically, signed by the sisters in ink on the verso in the same hand seen in other known examples. Wearing striped dresses, jewelry, pointed shoes and coifed hair, the two sisters stand.....