Endnotes to An Introduction to a New Book about the Zealy Daguerreotypes

1. [democratic medium] See John Wood, “The Curious Art and Science of the Daguerreotype,” chap. 5, this vol.

2. [many did] See Matthew Fox-Amato, “Portraits of Endurance: Enslaved People and Vernacular Photography in the Antebellum South,” chap. 4, this vol.

3. [he knew precisely what he was doing] “Introduction,” Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American, John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, eds. (New York and London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2015), p. ix.

4. [more than one occasion] Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Pictures,” in Picturing Frederick Douglass, John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, eds., p. 131.

5. [all important line of distinction] Ibid., p. 132.

6. [American school] Ethnology, originally understood as the comparative study of different cultures, was co-opted by these men to mean the comparative study of different races. The term retains today its original meaning of the comparative study of cultures.

7. [The Notts and Gliddens] Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, eds., Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Co., 1854).

8. [as Douglass called this group] George R. Gliddon spelled his last name with an “o,” but Frederick Douglass repeatedly used an “e,” which may have been intentional and meant to undermine Gliddon’s legitimacy.

9. [speak for themselves] Douglass, “Lecture on Pictures,” p. 130.

10. [the historical record is largely silent] In one publication, Louis Agassiz mentions having “examined closely many native Africans belonging to different tribes” and suggests the examinations were conducted as a kind of guessing game. See Louis Agassiz, “The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races,” Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany 49 (July 1850), p. 125. Such remarks, however, give us no insight into how the examinations were actually conducted or what his subjects thought of the experience. Robert W. Gibbes’s labels, scraps of paper glued to the daguerreotype cases, provide information about the African tribal origins of the men, as well as the name of each person’s enslaver; yet, again, these tell us nothing of the subject’s own experience. The reliability of the biographical information provided by Gibbes is also called into question given Agassiz’s own remarks about having been deceived about the men’s origins during the examinations.

11. [collaborative approach] In keeping with the disciplinary diversity represented by the contributors to this volume, the editors have embraced a certain amount of stylistic diversity, as well; in particular, the use of more than one convention for documentation, footnoting, and capitalization.

12. [a distinct origin] Louis Agassiz quoted by Asa Gray to John Torrey, January 24, 1847, Asa Gray Papers, Gray Herbarium Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

13. [American Negro exhibition] On black photographers, see Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). Frederick Douglass’s photographs are catalogued in Stauffer, Trodd, and Bernier, eds., Picturing Frederick Douglass; Du Bois’s project is deftly presented by Shawn Michelle Smith in Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).