Creating a sensation: The Bully Boy" on a bicycle" – Historic Print
![Creating a sensation: The Bully Boy" on a bicycle", [New York] : Currier & Ives, 1881. — antique lithograph](https://images.jameslantos.com/img/70/70e71cc3d207-L.webp)
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
Few images capture their era like this antique lithograph of Creating a sensation: The Bully Boy" on a bicycle". Sourced directly from the Library of Congress, it represents an authentic piece of documented history.
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Creating a sensation: The Bully Boy" on a bicycle"
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The title names its subject outright: "The Bully Boy" on a bicycle, a figure of ridicule set against the era's new fad. The bicycle craze of the early 1880s was a fashionable novelty, and Currier & Ives, the New York firm known for sentimental and comic prints, issued this lithograph as part of its Darktown series, which mocked Black urban life through racist caricature. Such images drew on minstrel-show stereotypes that circulated widely in the decades after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Today the print is most useful as evidence of how popular media portrayed Black Americans and how their presence in public life was met with ridicule.
| Created / published | [New York] : Currier & Ives, 1881. |
|---|---|
| Medium | 1 print : lithograph. |
| Genre | c1983 |
| Notes | Caricature issued as part of the Darktown comics" series. Currier & Ives : a catalogue raisonné / compiled by Gale Research. Detroit |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,536 × 1,093 px · prints to 5 × 4 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-174277 |
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