Since the introduction of caricature in portraits in the 16th century, this method of exaggerated drawing has been widely used as visual satire in advertisements, journalism, literature, and art. In the late 19th-century, caricatures appeared in trading cards placed by tobacco companies in cigarette packages to serve as advertising to bourgeois consumers and add rigidity to the packages. These collectible cards depicted the period’s cultural norms and featured actresses, sports, travel, and more. In fact, the most valuable baseball card in history is a cigarette card (T206 Honus Wagner card, published 1909–1911 by the American Tobacco Company).
Duke’s Cigarettes, founded by James Buchanan Duke in Durham, North Carolina (which later became the conglomerate American Tobacco Company) released a set of cards in 1889 titled the “Coins of all Nations”, printed by Knapp & Co., NY. Coins from fifty nations were attached to cards containing illustrative, satirical caricatures of racial and ethnic stereotypes as an attempt at humor. The caricatures give insight into Americans’ misguided and negative views of people from other nations. An historical distance enables a view of these stereotypes as dehumanizing, offensive, and racist, especially considering the imperialist and colonialist practices of the 19th century and the history of slave labor in the tobacco industry.
Using the “Coins of all Nations” cards set from the NYPL digital collections, this website project is an archival provocation and an online exhibit, looking at publicly accessible materials through the lens of a specific collection. The cultural moment we’re currently experiencing offers opportunities for archival practices that look at digital public collections from new perspectives and alternative narratives. This project intervention attempts to create an interactive, archival experience that demands speculation from the audiences who engage with the website and its contents. Through a curation and presentation of ephemeral artifacts from approximately the same time period as the “Coins of all Nations”, visual connections between materials that are publicly available can form unique historical viewpoints, reveal factors that contribute to the racial and ethnic stereotypes depicted on the cigarette cards, offer insight into the origins of the material at the NYPL, and create alternative relationships between objects that are already associated by time period and place.
This archival provocation prompts the following digital humanities inquiries:
- How can existing archives and publicly accessible materials be reconstructed and for what purposes?
- What is the role of subjectivity, ambiguity and speculation in assembling and caring for archives?
- Does a process of close reading visual elements, without explicit interpretation or analysis provide new points of entry into history?
- Can the design of an online archive provide an environment to generate new meaning between archival materials and between viewer and materials?
Continue reading about the methodology.
Statement on Sensitive Materials and Language
My goal in creating this Archival Provocation is not to bring undue attention to racist and ethnic stereotypes, posing as humor in 19th century caricatures. Rather, I hope that a new context has been established through this website experience, one that generates new meaning and historical perspective, not only from the cigarette cards, but also from the other materials used from the NYPL digital collections. I've attempted to create a viewing environment with the knowledge that the images shown are sensitive in nature and may cause emotional responses.
Titles and other metadata information were taken directly from the NYPL and may have been written using terminology that I do not agree with. For text that I have written, such as the descriptions of the individual cigarette cards, I've made every effort to express what I see in the caricature illustration without reinforcing stereotypes through harmful language and phrasing.
I acknowledge this website is challenging to view but I welcome comments. Please contact me. Thank you for viewing.
Duke’s Cigarettes, Coins of all Nations, 1889, An Archival Provocation was created and designed by Patricia Belen for Remote Archival Encounters, Prof. Duncan Faherty and Prof. Lisa Rhody, MA in Digital Humanities Program, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. All images are public domain from The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.