A stereograph, also known as a stereoview or view, consists of two nearly identical photos mounted side by side on a card or glass. When this view is placed inside a stereoscope, which resembles an antique version of a 1980’s View-Master, the images seemingly merge to create one three-dimensional image. In the late 19th-century, the images were commonly  produced as card prints. Most images were black and white, 3.5 by 3.5 inches, and published with a caption underneath.

Following their invention, stereographs proliferated globally and were popular in the United States among the general public from the 1870s to the 1920s. A photographer would capture an image such as an event, a travel location, a landscape, or a person. A popular form of these images was the comic stereograph, which upper-middle class Americans generally consumed as parlor-entertainment. While some stereographs contained wholesome holiday scenes, others drew upon racial and sexual stereotypes for comedic purposes. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the use of bigoted humor was quite commonplace in visual mediums such as postcards, minstrel shows, and later silent films.

This kind of messaging ultimately reveals the ways in which oppressive racial and sexual politics continued to govern U.S. society, culture, and law after the Reconstruction era, naturalizing certain racial and gender hierarchies. Images of African Americans and immigrant maidservants, in particular, were a favorite subject for well-to-do white social circles. These images were meant to elicit laughter and drew upon degrading preexisting beliefs to ensure such a response from white audiences. As people consumed this type of media it reinforced a specific racial-sexual order in the viewers' minds.

In this digital documentary edition, we provide seven stereographs that put American attitudes toward race and gender on display. These stereographs draw upon a few stereotypes predominant in late nineteenth-century American society: African Americans' uncleanliness, the inferiority of African American Vernacular (to Standardized American English), and the sexual availability and slow-wittedness of Irish maidservants. The images range in date from 1898 to 1901 and were produced by the International View Company, based out of Decatur, Illinois. By presenting these stereographic images and placing them in context, we hope to help students study the history of these stereotypes and of a key technology that helped propagate them.

This digital documentary edition is part of our open scholarly publishing series SourceLab. This publication is maintained by SourceLab's Editorial Board, which conducts rigorous peer review of every new edition. It is intended as an Open Educational Resource, and for free and unrestricted use in all settings under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).