Vila Wolf's Dyslexic Folklorist Ranting

Trio of musicians, 1880s (via)

Bird girls of Szegeden, Hungary, 1880s (via Vintage Photo)

Nate Salsbury in the 1880s, founder and manager of Salsbury’s Troubadours, a musical comedy troupe that performed in the 1870s-80s.  Salsbury later became co-owner of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show (via Vintage Photo)

Walter Potter (1835-1918) was a taxidermist who specialized in the unique. His pieces usually involved animals in human-like situations, often wearing clothing.  His specimens mainly died of natural causes, like in this piece, "Monkey Riding a Goat, c. 1870s."  The monkey was acquired after he robbed a fruit stand in Shoreham, and was doused with a bucket of cold water.  The shock killed him.  The goat, on the other hand, was extremely aggressive, and was “put to an end". (via A Case of Curiosities)

Un Coup de Pompe

unknown 1899

This is the Blackgang Chine Bazaar at the Isle of Wight’s Blackgang Chine Amusement Park.  Alexander Dabell established the amusement park in 1843, making it one of the oldest (or perhaps the oldest) amusement park in the United Kingdom.  In 1842 a huge fin whale had been stranded off the Needles.  Dabell bought it at auction, sold off the blubber, had the bones bleached, and transported across the island to a specially built hut. (via Vintage Photo LJ)

1890s performers (via Vintage Photo LJ)

19th century beard (via Vintage Photo LJ)

Latin American presidential inaugurations: Brazil, 1891.

Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca became the first president of the Brazilian Republic in 1891 after the overthrow of the country’s imperial government. His swearing-in was re-imagined in this 1925 painting by Eliseu Visconti.

Today In Latin American History

Teresa Cristina of the Two Sicilies, wife and consort of Dom Pedro II, the second and last monarch of the Empire of Brazil, died in Oporto, Portugal on December 28, 1889, over a month after the Brazilian monarchy had been overthrown by a military coup. Her life spanned the entire 67-year-long duration of the Empire of Brazil: She was born in Naples to King Francis I of the Two Sicilies and his wife Maria Isabella of Spain on March 14, 1822, the same year that Brazil gained independence from Portugal. Traveling to Brazil to marry at age 21, Teresa Cristina would stay in South America for the next 28 years, returning to visit Europe a decade after her home country, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, had been incorporated into a unified Italy. She and Dom Pedro had four children, three of whom predeceased her. Teresa Cristina’s remains were initially entombed in the pantheon of the House of Braganza, the Portuguese royal family to which her husband belonged, only to be repatriated to Brazil in 1921.

Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who crowned himself Emperor shortly after Haitian independence, was assassinated near Port-au-Prince at age 48 on October 17, 1806.

Marketplace in Mompox, Colombia (1826)

Lei Áurea

The Lei Áurea, or Golden Law, which abolished Black slavery in Brazil, was signed by the Imperial Princess Isabel on May 13, 1888. Isabel was acting as regent while her father, the Brazilian Emperor Pedro II, was out of the country. It marked the last of a series of laws enacted in the second half of the nineteenth century which gradually did away with slavery in the country. Brazil, which received the largest number of enslaved Africans during the time of the slave trade and is now home to the largest Black population outside of the African continent, was the last Western nation to outlaw slavery. The sixty-seven-year-long Empire of Brazil would come to an end the following year with the ouster of the Emperor and the establishment of an ostensibly republican government in 1889.