JF Ptak Science Books

What to Do When the Bombs (and Gas) Come(s)--Austria, 1935.

JF Ptak Science Books  (Earlier post corrected).

This is another in a series of posts about the use of maps and images in propaganda, principally concentrating in the 1930's and 1940's.  This pamphlet, Luftschutz durch Selbstschutz Schtz fuer jedermann bei Fliegerangrissen), was published by the Luftschutzbund and written by Hugo Noll in Vienna in 1935.  The title page claims that this is the 4th (augmented) edition, with the print run already above 30,000 (which you can either believe or not (is there anyone who starts their program out as version 1.0?)) 

The pamphlet begins right at the beginning--the cover shows Austria in red, surrounded by airplanes of its enemies, with a bomb coming down into the heart of the country in a yellow triangle (which resembles a flame).  The striking design begs to be picked up by anyone who sees it--as I did, as a person here in its future; I'm sure that it must've been very provocative to its target audience.  It gets immediately into the idea of Austria being surrounded by nations who wish do it harm by air.  Another map in the text is more detailed and shows exactly where the threat was coming from--as you can see the threat was coming perhaps from everywhere, except Germany, which as the map indicates had no aircraft in its air force. Austria of course would be annexed in the Anschluss of 12 March 1938, just three years later.   

The main body of the text is a series of warnings about what to do when the bombs come; the rest of it has to do with preparing yourself and your household from attack, which means that there's allot of digging and canning and putting away water and fire retardant.  In general the population was getting very stirred up about the sure-to-arrive but survivable Apocalypse.  
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Music, Color, Shape, and Synesthesia (1890)

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• "A studious blind man, who had mightily beat his head about visible objects, and made use of the explication of his books and friends, to understand those names of light and colours which often came in his way, bragged one day, That he now understood what scarlet signified. Upon which, his friend demanding what scarlet was? The blind man answered, It was like the sound of a trumpet."— John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

This is a big subject for a quick post, the subject of synesthesia having an origin enfogged in mist and with ill-defined boundaries, or at least that is until we get to the 19^th century. If we leave aside the earlier thinking (by folks like the quoted Mr. Locke, above) we can speed ahead to Gutav Fechner (the father of psychophysics) with his empirical study of a group of synesthetes in 1871. He was quickly followed by Francis Galton (in 1881, a paper that I write about elsewhere on this blog), though neither Fechner nor Galton's work in this area achieved very much recognition beyond pale acknowledgment. Things speed up somewhat in the early 20thc when the empirical work is taken more seriously.

But stepping back for a moment, I'd just like to share this unusual and interesting 1890 paper from Nature. I never bumped into it before nor could I find more than a couple of bare references to it. So I'm wondering if anyone out there knows anything about it—this is done in the spirit of the original author of the paper, George Newton, who posted his story ("Visualized Images Produced by Music", March 6, 1890) to see if anyone else in nature-world recognized anything like the situation he describes.

The opening paragraph of the paper:

“IN the annexed paper, and in her own words, are related the very curious effects produced on a lady friend by certain musical tones and orchestral combinations. They are so very singular, entirely outside my experience, and, withal, so inexplicable, that I shall be glad if you will give them a place in your columns, in the hope that some of your readers-physiological or psychological-may be able to throw some light on them.”

A Rare Work Detailing the Minor but Important Social Aspects of Life in the USSR, 1933

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2815

Here's a very unusual and interesting pamphlet that I just found, and partially read. Philena Weller Montgomery and John Ferguson Montgomery wrote Traveling Hard Through the USSR¹, a travelogue on their trip through the old country in the mean and bitter summer of 1933. They printed the pamphlet themselves in 1934, giving their address as 1105 Morrison Ave, Bronx, NYC.

They produced a remarkable major-minor work, I think, making hundreds of small observations on the little bits and bobs of everyday life that one usually does not see in a work like this. For example, they walk around Stalingrad and rather than remark on the great sights and vistas they report on the state of window displays—that there were unrelated objects on display, like urinals with lamp lights and pictures of clothing for sale that the storekeep didn't have, and that the windows were dirty and hadn't been cleaned in months or years, and that the broken ones were fixed with metal and rivets; that sort. That's the real strength of this work, I think; the ability of the writers to see the small local, personal detail—they weren't interested so much in a grand building, but rather the women who were scrubbing the marble floors with some evil-smelling something because there was a shortage of soap; and not so much the boat they were passengers on, but rather the shabby dress whites of the captain and how he moved through the crew and how the crew responded to that; not the grand vistas of old St. Petersburg but rather the dirty shop windows that displayed pictures of items that they didn't have in stock.

The authors left with a group of 10 other people (fellow students?) for a loosely-guided trip through the Soviet Union. This was not a North Korean-style tourist experience for this group; they write that even though they had a guide that they were in no way constrained from wandering off or speaking to anyone they wished; they felt that there was no control over their activity outside of the route they were following for their visit. The fact that they saw so much poverty and hardship, and interviewed whomever they pleased, attests to the limited control the state placed on their tour.

Their adventure begins in Leningrad, and moves to Moscow, Gorki, Kaza, Samara, Saratov, Stalingrad, Rostov, Yalta, Odessa, and then back west via Kiev. The authors write that if the USSR were really trying to control what the visitors saw that they would positively not send people out of or into the country via Kiev because of the state of the city and the people.

I'm sharing this here just in case anyone out there knows anything about this work—I do plan on posting the full work here in the near future.

Here are some notes from my reading:

Kiev

• pale children working elevators at night of their hotel;

• more Bezpreysosny (orphans) here than they saw in all the rest of the Soviet Union combined;

• city swarmed with red Soldiers and OGPU;

• shop windows displayed odd assortments—corks, urinals, bridge lamps, washboards, side-by-side, with very little consumer goods;

• buildings were shabby as were the people, especially the children, “who show the effects of suffering”';

• visit to a Jewish collective farm

"Found Art" in Architectural Engineering (1868)

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Aha! Another lovely image for the long "FOund Art"/"Found Dadaist" categories on this blog, this being an engineering simulation for the building of domes.  The image was found as an illustration in "The Supportive Power of Piles, Both as Wood and Iron, and the Use of the Latter, Either as Piles or Columns of Support for Foundations",  found on pp 98-110, and pp 170-182, in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, vol 55 (3rd series), 1868.  

Humpty Dumpty on Words (History of Nothing series)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post (History of Nothing series)

Watching the performances of the U.S. president for these thousand+ days—particularly exemplified in the wind/”wind mill” address--seeing him teetering and as always ready for a fall that never happens, put me in mind of an old character, Humpty Dumpty. This doesn't apply for what happened to Humpty Dumpty in the old rhymes, but for what he said in Mr. Carroll's book:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

--Lewis Carroll,  Alice Through the Looking Glass, (1871), Lewis Carroll's sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).  This one isn't doesn't have such a cushioned fall through the rabbit hole, and has very sharp edges all the way around. Carroll introduces us to the reverse in this world, having Alice step through a mirror into a realm that is a reflection of sorts of what her world once was, including the example of logic above that so fits the U.S. situation at the top of the turtle stack.  Or bottom--das macht nichts.  

Communication when the speaker uses a private truth table is difficult (for the listener). 

And then I wondered about whether or not Wittgenstein had ever read Carroll, which is way more of a question that I can answer in one of these quick posts with the one-hour time limit imposed—suffice to say that it is something interesting to pursue.

For now, a good quote from the early W:

“Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all.”--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus... 5.5303.)

For an interesting read not quite on the point of whether W read C, see: George Pitcher, “Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll”, The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Spring-Summer, 1965), pp. 591-611

A View of Manhattan from the Top of the Brooklyn Bridge, 1877

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Yes,  this is indeed a wonderful and celebratory view of Manhattan from the top of the East Tower of the under-construction East River ("Brooklyn") Bridge. The thing about this is that the view seems to be too good, the tower too tall...unless there is something odd about the perspective and bird's eye view of it. From this vantage point we're looking south-east towards the battery and then Governor's Island and then out to Jersey and Brooklyn with Staten Island in the distance.  Now the steeple we see downtown is Trinity Church, standing there at 284'; given that the tower is 278' tall,  this perspective completely dwarfs the church for reasons I do not know. I'm not sure what's going on--perhaps this is more a suggestive view than an actual you-are-there rendering.   The source:  Scientific American, October, 1877.                         

Camouflage on the Belgian Front, 1915

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Its a little difficult to think of Ellsworth Kelly, Jacques Villon, Grant Wood, Laslo Moholy-Nagy and Thomas Hart Benton as painters-for-war.  But its true, and true for many of hundreds of other artists in the 1915-1918 era. Its not as though they were in the trenches gunning down the enemy or lobbing hand grenades into the swirling gunsmoke. They were camofleurs, camouflage¹ experts, artists employed as magicians, Wartime Magi, employed/drafted to make ships and such disappear. 

Ever since it was (sort of) first noticed in 1915 that designs odd to the environment, stark geometric patterns and such, were capable of fooling the eye, people with  design capacity were pressed into service, rendering offensive and defensive instruments of war optically semi-impervious with variations of the then-five-year-old modern nonrepresentational art. That must've been a very odd position to wake up to every morning. 

Of course the idea of camouflage in the animal world is probably 250 million years old--animals and insects have been blending into their environment for eons, and I'm sure too that early hominids did their fair share of walking behind brush.  But the idea of hiding great amalgamations of very heavy metal with paint is really quite modern.

In this photograph the camouflage is more a more futuristic conception of art than the abstract and cubist approaches that were taken during the war, this looking more like assemblages of found material more than anything else.  And, according to the text that accompanied the photograph (which comes from 1918, from the Underwood & Underwood news photo service agency), the camouflage--empty sandbags thrown on a barbed wire fence) successfully concealed a gunnery emplacement for months on end. 

 

Notes

1. A fine bibliography on camouflage appears here, at Leonardo Online.

The definition of "camouflage" from the Oxford English Dictionary shows that it is a young word, in English:

"(n) The disguising of any objects used in war, such as camps, guns, ships, by means of paint, smoke-screens, shrubbery, etc., in such a way as to conceal it from the enemy; also, the disguise used in this way; freq. attrib.

 

1917    Daily Mail 25 May 4/4   The act of hiding anything from your enemy is termed ‘camouflage’.

1917    Daily Mail 16 July 5/3   The King paid a visit to what is called a camouflage factory.

1922    C. E. Montague Disenchantment viii. 108   A French aerodrome across which the French camouflage painters had simply painted a great white high-road.

 

Strange Things in the Sky Department: Floating Arms

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  (An entry in the "Found Absurdist" category)

There's a series on this concentrating on unusual things found "floating" in the sky, bits and bobs that are odd, or visual non sequiturs ("sequuntur"?) that just happen to use a landscape as a decorative visual for the viewer, and so on. There are many varieties of this atmospheriana, including floating cities, bombing ladies, eyeballs, hands, extra-earths, alien populations, and the unexpected like. Today's entry is less involved than those, showing a disarticulated arm and shoulder floating above a gentle landscape...all this is, in real life, is an engraving showing a number of different varieties of engraving, all presented on one leaf rather than using several. The explanation for the image is boring, but the stand-alone of the unexplained floating arm isn't.

Source:  Abraham Bosse, 1604-1676 (printmaker and artist), in his classic work on engraving and illustration, Traité des manières de graver en taille-douce..., 1645.

• https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k117103s

A Field-Constructed Piano, November 1918.

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This fine image was made for distribution to newspapers and magazines, and was printed 2 November 1918--just nine days before the armistice--and shows the "Broadway Quartet" as they rehearse "I'm Only a Buck Private" for a behind-the-lines show for U.S. servicemen, somewhere in France.  The note with the image (from the Western Newspaper Union) says that the staging used for their shows came from found wood, bits of flooring, and camouflage netting torn into pieces.  

 

A Lovely and Lonely Plainness, by Margaret Bourke-White

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2814

I happened upon some photographs by the great Margaret Bourke-White yesterday in a most unexpected place--an upper-end oversize pamphlet advertising the perfume and oils business of Fritzsche Brothers of NYC. No disrespect to Fritzsche--which was in its 65th year of business--but it was a surprise to see the work of a pioneering and iconic photographer like Bourke-White in such a relatively common setting. Of course photographers need to pay the bills, too, and I'm sure that Bourke-White was well paid for her ultra-competent and accomplished business and industrial assignments. She was probably very well paid considering that she already had a national audience, being the first photographer for the new Fortune magazine, with her photo essays appearing there beginning in 1930. 

The Fritzsche pamphlet was published in 1937, just a year or so before she made her first LIFE magazine cover.  She had a tremendous run between 1935-1950, and seemed to be everywhere, seeing everything. She was the first U.S. war photo-correspondent covering WWII and Korea; she was at concentration camps in 1945 and with Stalin in 1944 and Gandhi in 1949, and was a superb documentarian of the human experience during the Great Depression--even her first assignment at Fortune found her making photographs of the bank vault at the First National Bank of Boston coincidentally on the evening of Black Tuesday, 1929. 

Here's a photo of Bourke-White at work (from her first-photographer-at-Fortune-magazine days). and one of her most recognizable works made during the Great Depression:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• (Sources: The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/08/photography-of-margaret-bourke-white/596980/ and Wikicommons.)

And then here she was in the relatively bland pages of the Fritzsche promo, making images of reception areas, loading docs, labs, a library, some VP studiously at work at a small desks...however when you look closely at the rooms she was working in you can appreciate that it was a difficult assignment, and that lighting was a problem, though it was one that she solved.  The odd thing is that everything in these photos is sort of the same, that a general blankness/blandness has taken over, all of the people with similar expressions, and then something else...that in this very large collection of offices there's absolutely noting on the walls except for an occasional clock here and there. Other than that exception, there are no wall decorations. Given that the company is chemically decorating the air around people, it strikes me as a little odd that the physical surroundings was such a collection of nothing.  Here's the reception area as an example of the environment's assertive blandness:

There are 22 such photos of hollow spartanness, well-lighted. And very tidy.

Here's another:

The blank walls become even more oppressive when you consider the number of walls in the place: 

 

I guess Bourke-White did as well as could be done with what there was...

 

Christmas Mail, December 1917

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This is the U.S. Army mail depot at Regents Park, London, braced for and under siege by  Christmastime mail in 1917. It strikes me that there may be a million items in this photo--at this time in the war there were something like 35 million people in the services for all countries dedicated to the war effort, which is approximately half the number that served in total.  If these letters in this picture were bodies, I reckon that there would be five more rooms like this necessary to tell the visual picture of the war dead and wounded.  This aside, I initially focused on the guy in the rear with the white shirt and tie, standing there pretty much overwhelmed by the task of moving all of that stuff...and perhaps with the idea that much of the mound would wind up being undeliverable because the recipient was killed.  I wonder if that mail was returned, or not?

Robot-Art of the Future and Far-Sighted Art of the Past

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2813

[Johannes Reuchlin, Augenspiegel...1511]

What happened to art in the period before Impressionism that was made by people who needed glasses and didn't or couldn't wear them?  The answer is obvious because, I think, nothing quite like that exists in galleries or public collections:  people who painted but had poor vision were probably/simply told that they couldn't paint.  If a far-sighted person without corrective specs attempted to paint a sunset over a forest, and painted it exactly  as they saw it, and were doing this in 1787, there work undoubtedly would have been rejected as utterly failing in realism.  On the other hand, the result of their work may have been beautiful collections of forms and colors capturing the essence of the forest and the sunset, but they would have been 50 years shy of the JMW Turner time, and 70 years or whatever shy of the Impressionists.  

A person with poor or disturbed vision who tried to paint during this time would have been roundly scooted out of the palace of correct painting, though they could have been inspirations to generations of Barnett Newmans and Jasper Johns and Clyfford Stills and Wassily Kandinskys.

All this said, does something like Edvard Munch's The Voice (1893) start to look a little "different" if you imagine a far-sighted artist at work without their glasses?

Or a vision-impaired person producing Les Alpilles (1890) instead of a visionary Van Gogh?

Or a macular degenerating issue producing a painting like Georgia Okeefe's Light Coming on the Plains III (1917)?

 

Or a half-blind artist painting Matisse's The Open Window, Collioure (1905), simply painting exactly what they saw?  

I don't think of revolutionary artworks in terms of their common ophthalmologic varieties--I just wanted to make a point about what happened to all of that artwork that was no doubt produced by people with impaired vision before the Impressionists and Fauves and non-representational artists came into being.  I wonder if those who received J.M.W. Turner (as with, say, Rain, Steam, Speed--the Great Western Railway, 1844) so badly so early on in his career and so early in the History of Disappearing Details wondered whether he had a visual issue, or not? 

And in a way, similar to the probably non-existent vision-challenged art of the past is the Robot art of the future--or at least the robot art of what was described by P.K. Hoenich in his article "Robot-Art, the Hopeful Monster" that appeared in two part in the unlikely journal Cybernetica in 1963 and 1964.  It was with high hopes that I started reading this article wanting the author to address robots-making-art in the future.  After all, my friend George Widener, who is a fabulously gifted artist,  directs some of his fantastically involved calculating/numerical artworks to the interests of his robot-collectors of the future--given this case, why (if the robots are collecting) wouldn't they also produce art themselves?  And why, if given the legions and multitudes of robots of the future couldn't they produce every recorded piece of art that has ever existed and then insinuate development and trends and institution and all of the other gifts of the singularity and produce all of the works of art that will ever be produced?

Well, Hoenich turns out to be describing "robots" of a very different sort, whether he uses the term "monster" in his title or not.  He was broadly addressing a style of art that is produced by externally-controlled structures (mostly), and his particular brand was a mobile-like device with art bits whose movement was powered by the wind...and also used found spectra and sunlight.  It was not what I was hoping for, the vision of robots-at-the-easels/keyboard/whatever remaining unfulfilled. 

Still it was an interesting read, mostly in laying Hoenich in a continuum of similar artists whose "robots" were the wind (as for example with a Calder) or Nicolas Schoeffer (with spectacular luminodynamics) or Mohly-Nagy (with a combo of light and movement) or Arp (with chance painting) and maybe even Pollock. I guess even Duchamp could be included in a category like this if you considered his work to be governed by selective, found chance, a sort of choice-chance, for his Readymades. 

So in a way these artworks were made by "robots" insofar as they were produced by not-exactly the artist but with external assistance.

"Squinting with Art" perhaps could have been the title of this post--squinting at your landscape to see it with semi-non-representational vision, and squinting at the titles of other works to make their possibility more appealing to what you 'd like to see. 

High Realism in Anatomical Art: the Skull (1872)

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The collaborative work of anatomist Wilhelm Braune (1831-1892) and artist C. Schmiedel (fl. mid-1800s) produced a singular work,  Topographisch-anatomischer atlas nach durchschnitten an gefrorenen cadavern...(published in Leipzig in 1872), which was an outstanding example of high-realism in the art of anatomy. This book is pretty much right-to-business, with no extraneous bits as had appeared in anatomies for centuries. And even though these practices had pretty much expired by the first quarter of the 19th century, Braune/Schmiedel was ever more so detailed and simple--their design was fabulous, and their detail light and exceptional. 

 

[Source: National Library of Medicine.]

They also made use of sliced frozen sections of cadavers, which seems to give their work that crystalline touch.  The first image looks at the brain from top-to-bottom, while the second reverses the view, which is in itself somewhat unusual, even in 1872. 

"What's Left of the Jews?" (July 26, 1945)

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Meyer Levin (1905-1981, journalist, editor of Esquire from 1933-39, and author of numerous books and articles) encountered and confronted the Holocaust in-person at the end of WWII in Europe and wrote about it in the pages of The Nation. His article, "What's Left of the Jews", bluntly confronts the millions of murdered Jews, and then locates where the remaining populations were. And then he discusses the improbable and incredible rise in anti-Semitism that survivors faced. His piece was published July 28, 1945, two months after VE Day.  I reprint the article below.

Levin writes:

"Before the war there were sixteen million Jews in the world. Little more than half are left. Nobody really believes in the annihilation of the Jews of Europe. There are certain facts so massive that the human mind for a long time rejects them, and this has happened with the story of European Jewry. The survivors themselves, after living these years within the massacre, don’t believe their own knowledge of its completeness..."

A Map of Prostitution AND "Negro" as a Nationality (1913)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2813

There were two big surprises in this 1913 work¹ on prostitution in Portland, Oregon--I mean, aside from the normal "surprises" and "unexpecteds"one expects from an early 20th c study on the sex trade. (If someone wanted to do a version of The Deuce as Portlandia Nights 1913 this report would be atomic material.) The book runs 200 pages and for the time is filled with unusual social history, snapshot observations, interviews, police involvement, data of all shapes and sizes, and that sort. The book is fairly comprehensive--all things considered--and the efforts are distributed to the following sections: “A Report on the Social Evil, as affecting places of public resort and accommodation; hotels, apartment houses, rooming and lodging houses”, pp 4-81; “On the Legal and Police Aspects of the Social Evil”, pp 81-122; “A Report on the Juvenile Aspect”, pp 123-164; “Report on the Economic Aspect”, pp 165-202; “Report on a Segregated District”, pp 203-216.) Overall it is a survey of the grand scheme of prostitution (the "Social Menace") in Portland as it existed in one section of the city (Irving Street-Hall Street-23^rd St-Harbor line). It investigated 547 buildings/rooming houses and found 98 to be “moral”, 431 to be “immoral”, and a balance of 98 falling into a gray-ish “doubtful" category. 

• This post is based on a copy of this report that I have here--there is something online text at Hathi that has a slightly different title but looks to be the same that you can enjoy here: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100641247

The report surfaces some fascinating info: for example, there is a section on interviews with proprietors of the erstwhile hardly-vanilla hotels, which includes a number of very colorful quotes, including one “madame” from a bawdy house on Sixth Street, who claimed “Portland is the best town on the coast for a sporting woman to make money in.” Other madams agree! There are interviews with “sources of vice” (“grills, chauffeurs, pool rooms, messenger boys newsboys...”), police, civil service, hotel folk, that sort..  A good standard example of a description of one of the bawdy houses reads: “Hotel [unnamed and with no street address identified] Taylor Street. Shabby place of 46 rooms. Run by man and woman, who occupy front rooms, one of which the woman uses as a parlor, the other as a bed room for immoral business. Three prostitutes work for management, paying one-half of their earnings from bed money. Liquor sold.”

The “study of the docket”  is a listing of occupations of prostitutes, arrests, charges, fines, and wages paid the prostitute; there is a section on “testimony” in which the sex worker tells her story, and another section on the general living conditions in the bawdy houses. The last section in the publication deals with “segregation”, though the type of segregation here has nothing to do with race, and simply means that there would be a set-aside space for sex businesses in Portland.

So, the first surprise: there is also a very daring and fascinating map in the first section of the report which identifies hundreds of the Social Evils establishments. They are classified top-to-bottom in the following way: “Moral houses”, followed by "Moral status not determined” and then steeping into “immortality countenanced or ignored”, to “immoral tenants desired or preferred”, and then finally to “house wholly given up to immorality”. The odd thing about the map is that it seems to be overlay, meaning that the details of the actual geographical part of the map are left out and there is no underlying map on which this skeleton map is laid (as published). The map isn't quite a "map" as much as it shows approximate vicinities and coagulations of these establishments in relation to one another and confined to that one particular part of Portland. I guess that leaving out the exact addresses was a preventative measure to squash the possible plans of some enterprising people to use a detailed map as a Guidebook to Portland Houses of Ill Repute.  

The second major unexpected surprise: on page 96 there is a listing of nationalities of prostitutes arrested—in the accompanying table the leading nationality is “American” followed by “Negro” and then “German”...which seems to me that U.S. Citizenship is being denied to African Americans on the basis of race, and that, evidently, “Negroes” are not American citizens. And according to the law in the state of Oregon in 1913, “Negroes” were not even allowed to migrate to the state, stated as such right in the Oregon constitution—a law that was not addressed and eliminated until 1924. I suspect that African Americans were illegally in the state and thus, somehow, had their rights of citizenship in the USA stripped away. Or perhaps this was the work of a racist editor, or author, or someone;; one person, one small group, that instigated this classification. Or maybe it was someone ignorant who just go the whole thing wrong and which was subsequently missed by the editor. I don't know. All I can say about this is that this is the first time I've seen African Americans introduced in a statistic post-1865 as citizens of the U.S. who were deemed to be not so. 

Notes:

1. Talbot, Henry Russell. Report of the Portland Vice Commission to the Mayor and City Council of the City of Portland, Oregon.. Portland, 1913. 9”x 6”, 216pp. Original stiff wrappers. Provenance: Library of Congress via the Washington DC Public Library.