I find I journalize too tediously. Let me try to abbreviate.

White actors in blackface were so common that even Shirley Temple was painted down in The Littlest Rebel (1935).

Their semipronated right hand gripped a manipulandum underneath a horizontally suspended mirror.

James…found his mind, perhaps, in that obnubilated state, which we generally experience when told any thing very much out of the common way, or of which we cannot well make the different facts tally.