Trade card:Brazil

Trade cards were the baseball cards of Victorian America. Decorated with elaborate, colorful designs that often bore no connection to the products they endorsed, the cards were issued by advertisers who expected consumers to collect them as reminders of their products. Some companies, like Arbuckle Brothers Coffee, produced whole series of cards to collect. Satisfying Americans' hunger for the exotic, Arbuckle Brothers printed this series of 50 cards on the "history of sports and pastimes of all nations." Presented as an educational tool, the cards advanced stereotypes about distant cultures and exotic practices in a gesture of self-aggrandizing voyeurism. We learn, for example, that "the harem is the natural home of the women" in Arabia, and "the Turk" entertains guests with singers and "ravishing dancing girls." And with no reference to slavery, the cards describe Brazil as populated by "the descendants of the Spanish, . . . Negroes, and . . . Indians, . . . the two latter recognizing the supremacy of the former." "Anglo-Saxons," on the other hand, represent "a fusion of two splendid races." Printed in 1893, this series appeared at the end of the trade card heyday. By the turn of the century, the popularity of trade cards declined as magazines offered more a more effective means of advertising.