Postcards were popular ways for photographers to send images of the Empire back to the home country. The cabinet card style of portraiture became fashionable from about 1870. Images of colonized landscapes and people helped those back home to take ownership and...
In the Victorian period boys were more important than girls, were taught different lessons, and so achieved more. Or did they? Before camera phones, Instagram, and Snapchat, having your photograph taken was a big deal. You would have visited a professional...
Flipping through the pages of a magazine in the grocery check-out line, you would expect to see a variety of articles, including pages about the latest fashion trends. With summer vacation coming to an end in many parts of the world, magazines for teenage girls...
Hidden away in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is this photograph of three young Arab girls carrying water jugs. Taken sometime in the 1880s, we don’t know who made it, where it was taken, or who these girls are. Yet it says so much,...
One day, Winslow Homer visited Petersburg, Virginia, and decided to study the life of rural African-Americans. At a time when the South was still recovering from the Civil War and the legacy of slavery was fresh in everyone’s minds, Homer sought to...
Getting your first period is a big deal for girls. Imagine if your entire community knew about it? Some of us grew up in a world of privacy and shame around menstruation – and puberty in general – while others celebrate this life-changing event with...
