This is pretty cool. The first week of the semester, we discussed how African history was a new topic and that information about the continent was constantly being discovered. Well, Renee Mussai has found pictures from the Victorian Era of African Americans in the Hulton Archive, who had no idea they were there. I think that part of the story is fairly common. Historical archives have a lot of stuff and I've heard a couple different stories of people finding things that weren't even listed in the archive.
More importantly, this discovery and its subsequent display at the Rivington Palace in London is about showing the missing links in history. According to the article, the first time blacks were in Britain was in 1948 from Jamaica, but these photographs, taken in England, blow that idea out of the water.
Every photograph has a story behind it and that's what makes it so interesting. There are a couple shots of a group of female singers from South Africa, of an orphaned prince adopted by a British explorer, a rescued slave who was given as a 'gift' to Queen Victoria (I'm not sure how that worked as freedom, I'm hoping it was a symbolic sort of thing) and even a boxing champion. And all of this is from photographs taken around the time photographs were invented. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/sep/15/black-chronicles-ii-victorians-photography-exhibition-rivington-place
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