Skull

A crown in the shape of a human skull appears against a background of blood dripping into the title area at the bottom.

comments and context

Comments and Context

Cartoonist Carl Hassmann, in his apocalyptic mode, again chose the dissolution of the corrupt and doomed Romanov dynasty, as it seemed in 1905. Czar Nicholas was indeed beset by intractable problems — crises inside his family and court, inside and outside his country, his military, his subjects, his economy, his once-servile satellite states, his standing in the world. Yet it would be a dozen years before his reign crashed around him in the 1917 Socialist, then Bolshevik, revolutions. The bloody 1905 revolution was merely a precursor.

Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, sits on a throne, wearing a large skull topped with a cross as a crown. A Japanese man offers him papers labeled “Peace ‘with Honor’,” and a Jewish man, holding bags labeled “Jewish Loans,” stands in a palace doorway in the background. A basket overflowing with papers labeled “Jewish Petition [and] Protest against Kishineff Massacres” is on the floor. A paper on a desk states “Cost of War to Russia $1,042,500,000.”

comments and context

Comments and Context

The bleak twin situations of the St. Petersburg court are laid bare in this stark double-page cartoon by Joseph Keppler, Junior. Even before its disastrous war with Japan in the Far East, Czar Nicholas’s Russia was crumbling in virtually all ways possible. It was nearly bankrupt, losing control of its client states and border peoples, beset by protests from serfs and the bourgeoisie, facing assassination attempts and intrigues among underground Socialist, Communist, and Anarchist groups, and worldwide condemnation over Czarist suppression of religious and Jewish minorities.

Edmund Heller asks Theodore Roosevelt’s permission to lecture the various societies that have invited him to speak on his African safari work. He discusses describing the new species of small mammals collected in Sudan.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1910-11-26

Edmund Heller hopes Theodore Roosevelt will visit the National Museum of Natural History during his visit to Washington D. C. He discusses the status of the specimens.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1910-11-12

Edmund Heller received a copy of African Game Trails and appreciates Philip R. Goodwin’s illustrations. The entire African collection is at the National Museum of Natural History. Heller discusses his work on the rhinoceroses based on the skulls.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1910-09-22

William W. Hart writes President Roosevelt about the conditions of several bear skulls and skins that Roosevelt has asked to be shipped. A few of the skins are shedding but overall in good condition, while the skulls are somewhat damaged and mutilated. Hart will send the specimens on receipt of Roosevelt’s instructions.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1907-07-05

Taxidermist William W. Hart updates President Roosevelt on the wolf rug. Hart can either replace the broken teeth in the current skull or replace the skull itself with another which he has on hand.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1907-07-09

C. Hart Merriam received a batch of bear skulls from Colorado but did not receive any data to accompany them. He will ask his officer about the rattlesnakes, but kindly requests the data.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1905-08-03

Photograph shows hunter R. J. Cunninghame, Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Heller, and Hugh H. Heatley standing with African buffalo skulls in front of tent.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1919-05-14

Photograph shows hunter R. J. Cunninghame and Theodore Roosevelt inspecting a skull in front of a tent.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1910-04-04

An infant sits in an overturned, spike-topped helmet labeled “Militarism.” When the image is rotated 180° it shows a skull wearing a helmet. The image accompanies text by Benjamin De Casseres.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1914-09-19

An elderly Native man stands with his horse on the plains with a buffalo skull on the ground before them.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1913-10-08

C. Hart Merriam is pleased with the skulls and cat skins that Theodore Roosevelt sent. One of the skulls is the largest of the Felis concolor group that Merriam has ever seen. Roosevelt’s series of skulls from Colorado is “incomparably the largest, most complete, and most valuable series ever brought together.”

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1901-05-03