Wordless Wednesday - Black History Month

Comments

February 4, 2009 at 9:59 am

(1) Phylameana :

Oh, the elegance of a big hat.

February 4, 2009 at 12:47 pm

(2) Franny Syufy :

Beautiful lady and lovely photograph. Our own First Lady will undoubtedly be a huge example in womens’ history.

February 4, 2009 at 1:06 pm

(3) Sukhmandir Kaur :

What a beautiful young woman! That’s quite a hat she’s got

February 4, 2009 at 7:56 pm

(4) Nancy :

One of my colleagues at a college job told me about her mom, a sharecropper’s daughter, who used to help in the cotton fields as a small girl. I think everyone, regardless of race, can benefit from learning more about African American history.

July 23, 2009 at 1:29 pm

(5) Crystal :

Great picture, but can you guess what’s missing??? Did this “woman” have a name??? A story??? A little info??? Wow, lovely that there are photos of beautiful women in fancy dresses and hats; but what in the world is the point in adding a picture to a history site without any information given regarding the life of the person?

July 23, 2009 at 6:35 pm

(6) Jone Lewis :

Great questions, Crystal! Sad to say, W.E.B. duBois, who put together the photo album which included this picture, didn’t include that information. The title of the album (linked in the post above) indicates that he was more interested in showing a wide range of “types” than in documenting individual lives — but I share your mourning that we don’t know anything about the individual in this picture, or the women in many of the other photos in that album. For me, it makes the picture all the more haunting to realize that we don’t and probably can’t know more about this particular woman. So what’s the point of including it on a history site? Well, history is about what happens to the nameless people, too, and so images even without names can tell us something about what people’s lives were like. How people dressed in different periods of history (and among different groups) is one of the areas of interest to historians. If we were only interested in people whose lives we knew in detail, historians would have a lot less information to work with!