Blackface
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Blackface is the practice of non-black performers using burnt cork or theatrical makeup to portray a caricature of black people on stage or in entertainment.
This reproduction of a 1900 William H. West minstrel show poster, originally published by the Strobridge Lithographing Company, shows the transformation from a person of European descent to a caricature of a dark-skinned person of African descent.
FLIT advertisement by Dr. Seuss depicting blackface-styled caricatures of Black people
The white American actor John McCullough as Othello, 1878
Carrie Swain in blackface as Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Dreadnought hoax
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The Dreadnought hoax was a practical joke pulled by Horace de Vere Cole in 1910. Cole tricked the Royal Navy into showing their flagship, the battleship HMS Dreadnought, to a fake delegation of Abyssinian royals. The hoax drew attention in Britain to the emergence of the Bloomsbury Group, among whom some of Cole's collaborators numbered. The hoax was a repeat of a similar impersonation that Cole and Adrian Stephen had organised while they were students at Cambridge University in 1905.
Postcard published after the Cambridge Hoax
HMS Dreadnought at sea in 1906
The Dreadnought hoaxers in Abyssinian costume