About this item

A transporting work of photographic history that offers a haunting vision of how Americans viewed the world at the dawn of the twentieth century.Pull the yellowed card from the box and slide it into the viewer. Two binocular images, nearly identical, reveal a scene from the past in vivid, three-dimensional detail. Transcending space and time, the card shows the world as it existed in 1900, a moment when technology collapsed borders; when wars ignited between great powers; when natural forces brought disaster on surging, vulnerable cities -- a moment very much like our own.In 1900 the stereograph was king. Its three-dimensional optics created a virtual presence for the viewer. Millions of Americans, especially schoolchildren, absorbed ideas about race, class, and gender from such 3D images, the embodiment of the notion that "seeing is believing.