THIS IS A PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE AND SYLLABUS. PLEASE RE-VISIT THIS PAGE FOR UPDATES. [Jan. 10, 2012]
Pre-institute reading:
Louis P. Masur, The Civil War: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Peter H. Wood, Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); James W. Cook, “Seeing the Visual in U.S. History,” Journal of American History 95:2 (September 2008).
WEEK ONE
♦ Monday, July 9
Participants arrive in New York.
Afternoon – Venue: The Graduate Center, CUNY
Welcome, introductions, institute overview, scheduling of participant conferences with principal faculty, and orientation to Graduate Center facilities and resources. Principal faculty (Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns, Gregory Downs, and David Jaffee) discuss the Institute’s curriculum, and each introduces his/her own scholarly approach to the study of the war and visual culture, and how it relates to the institute’s overall structure and content.
Seminar with Alice Fahs on the visual landscape of the Civil War era.
•Reading: Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 1-61.
♦ Tuesday, July 10
Venue: New-York Historical Society
Morning: Seminar with Anthony Lee on Civil War photography of the war front and home front.
•Reading: Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), pp. 71-118. Suggested additional reading: Michael L. Carlebach, The Origins of Photojournalism in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), pp. 62-101; William Frassanito, Gettysburg: A Journey in Time (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975); Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young, Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
Lunch and option of two activities:
Conference sessions with institute faculty about project (scheduled earlier).
Participant project research.
Afternoon: Seminar with Deborah Willis on the black image and Civil War photography.
•Reading: Deborah Willis, Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (New York: The New Press, 1994), pp. 129-202. Suggested additional reading: Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers-1840 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), pp. xv-32; Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).
Conference sessions with institute faculty about project (scheduled earlier), or participant project research.
Evening: Dinner with all participants.
♦ Wednesday, July 11
Venue: The Graduate Center, CUNY
Morning: Seminar with Joshua Brown on the illustrated journalism of the Civil War.
•Reading: William Fletcher Thompson, “Illustrating the Civil War,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 45 (Autumn, 1961); Jan Zita Grover, “The First Living-Room War: The Civil War in the Illustrated Press,” Afterimage (February 1984). Suggested additional reading: William Fletcher Thompson, The Image of War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1959); Kathleen Diffley, “Splendid Patriotism: How the Illustrated London News Pictured the Confederacy,” Comparative American Studies 5:4 (2007); Gregg D. Kimball, “‘The South as It Was’: Social Order, Slavery, and Illustrators in Virginia, 1830-1877,” in Graphic Arts and the South: Proceedings of the 1990 North American Print Conference, ed. Judy L. Larson, with the assistance of Cynthia Payne (Fayettesville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993); Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 7-59.
Afternoon: Two hands-on workshops run in two sessions (half the participants in each workshop).
Session 1: Group A: Workshop examining wartime periodicals in the Seymour B. Durst Old York Library collection at the Graduate Center with Joshua Brown.
Group B: Workshop surveying online Civil War photography and pictorial press archives in the Graduate Center media lab with David Jaffee.
•Web archive examples: The Valley of the Shadow (University of Virginia); Selected Civil War Photographs (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress); Mathew Brady Civil War Photographs (National Archives Flickr project); Drawings of the American Civil War Era (Becker Collection, Boston College); The Civil War in America from the Illustrated London News (Becker Center, Emory University).
Session 2: Group A: Workshop surveying online Civil War photography and pictorial press archives in the Graduate Center media lab with David Jaffee.
Group B: Workshop examining wartime periodicals in the Seymour B. Durst Old York Library collection at the Graduate Center with Joshua Brown.
Participant project research/preparation (in Old York Library, Media Lab, or New York Public Library).
♦ Thursday, July 12
Venue: Newark Museum
Morning: Seminar with Peter H. Wood on Winslow Homer’s paintings and the representation of slavery and emancipation.
•Pre-Institute Reading: Peter H. Wood, Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War. Suggested additional reading: Steven Conn and Andrew Walker, “The History in the Art: Painting the Civil War,” in “Terrain of Freedom: American Art and the Civil War,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27:1 (2001); Sarah Burns, “Cartoons in Color: David Gilmour Blythe’s Very Uncivil War,” in Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Marc Simpson, ed., Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1988); Peter H. Wood and Karen C. C. Dalton, Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988); Harold Holzer and Mark E. Neely, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art (New York: Orion, 1993).
Afternoon: Seminar with Sarah Burns and Joshua Brown on history and art history methods and interdisciplinary opportunities in researching and teaching the Civil War.
•Reading: Michael L. Wilson, “Visual Culture: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?,” in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Conference sessions with institute faculty about project (scheduled earlier).
♦ Friday, July 13
Venue: The Graduate Center, CUNY
Morning: Seminar with Bruce Levine on recent trends in the study of the Civil War.
•Pre-Institute Reading: Louis P. Masur, The Civil War: A Concise History. Suggested additional reading: James M.McPherson, “What’s the Matter with History,” in James M. McPherson, Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Lunch: Group discussion led by Gregory Downs on researching and teaching the Civil War and ways the institute can assist participants’ projects.
Afternoon: Divided into four groups, participants will be conducted on tours of Civil War-related art and artifacts by Brown, Burns, Downs, or Jaffee at one of four museums and archives and will meet with curators and/or archivists.
WEEK TWO
♦ Monday, July 16
Venue: The Graduate Center, CUNY
Morning: Seminar with Richard Samuel West on Civil War political cartoons.
•Reading: Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 195-224; William Fletcher Thompson, The Image of War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1959), pp. 165-78. Suggested additional reading: William Fletcher Thompson, “Pictorial Images of the Negro during the Civil War,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 48:4 (Summer 1965); Christopher Kent, “War Cartooned/Cartoon War: Matt Morgan and the American Civil War in Fun and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,” Victorian Periodicals Review 36:2 (Summer 2003); Gary L. Bunker, From Rail-Splitter to Icon: Lincoln’s Image in Illustrated Periodicals, 1860-1865 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2001); Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Borritt, and Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984); Cameron C. Nickels, Civil War Humor (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010).
Afternoon: Seminar with Louis P. Masur on Images of Runaway Slaves.
•Reading: Patricia Hills, “Painting Race: Eastman Johnson’s Pictures of Slaves, Ex-Slaves, and Freedmen,” in Teresa Carbone and Patricia Hills, Eastman Johnson: Painting America (1999), pp. 121-166. Suggested additional reading: Eric Foner and Joshua Brown, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (2005); Marcus Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation (2010).
Participant project research/preparation (in Old York Library, Media Lab, or New York Public Library).
♦ Tuesday, July 17
Venue: New-York Historical Society
Morning: Seminar with Jeanie Attie on women and the Civil War home front.
•Reading: Jeanie Attie, “Warwork and the Crisis of Domesticity in the North,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Suggested additional reading: Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Seminar with Ellen Gruber Garvey on Civil War scrapbooks.
•Reading: Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Appropriation: Scrapbooks and extra-illustration,” Common-place 7:3 (April 2007).
Lunch and option of two activities:
Conference sessions with institute faculty about project (scheduled earlier).
Participant project research.
Afternoon: Seminar with Georgia Barnhill on women, pictorial ephemera, and the home front during the Civil War.
•Reading: Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 93-149. Suggested additional reading: Nina Silber, “Intemperate Men, Spiteful Women, and Jefferson Davis,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Mark E. Neely and Harold Holzer, The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Steven R. Boyd, Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); James M. Schmidt, Lincoln’s Labels: America’s Best Known Brands and the Civil War (Roseville, MN: Edinborough Press, 2009).
Conference sessions with institute faculty about project (scheduled earlier), or participant project research.
♦ Wednesday, July 18
Venue: The Graduate Center, CUNY
Morning: Hands-on session with David Jaffee and Donna Thompson Ray evaluating online collections of Civil War cartoons, prints, and ephemera and their value in research and in teaching in the new media classroom (GC media lab).
•Web archive examples: Bernard F. Reilly, Jr. American Political Prints, 1776-1876: Catalog of the Collection of the Library of Congress (Prints and Photographs Division); Northern Visions of Race, Region, and Reform (American Antiquarian Society); Abraham Lincoln Cartoons: Comic Portraits of His Presidency (HarpWeek); Pictorial Americana (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress); Civil War Era Collection (Gettysburg College); The Crisis of the Union (University of Pennsylvania Department of History).
Lunch: Group discussion led by Donna Thompson Ray on researching and teaching the Civil War and ways the institute can assist participants’ projects.
Afternoon: Seminar with Michael Sappol on the visualization of medicine and the body during and after the Civil War.
•Reading: L. M. Herschbach, “Prosthetic Reconstructions: Making the Industry, Remaking the Body, Modeling the Nation,” History Workshop Journal 44 (1997); Megan Kate Nelson, “Looking for Limbs in All the Right Places: Retrieving the Civil War’s Broken Bodies,” Common-place 12:1 (October 2011). Suggested additional reading: Keith F. Davis, “‘A Terrible Distinctness’: Photography of the Civil War Era,” in Photography in Nineteenth Century America, 1839-1900, ed. Martha Sandweiss (New York: Harry N. Abrams,1991); Kathy Newman, “Wounds and Wounding in the American Civil War: A (Visual) History,” Yale Journal of Criticism 6: 2 (Fall 1993): 63-85; Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); J. T. H. Connor and Michael Rhode, “Shooting Soldiers, Civil War Medical Images, Memory, and Identity in America,” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 5 (Winter 2003).
Conference sessions with institute faculty about project (scheduled earlier), or participant project research/preparation (in Old York Library, Media Lab, or New York Public Library).
♦ Thursday, July 19
Venue: The Graduate Center, CUNY
Morning: Seminar with Cynthia Mills on commemorative sculpture and monuments and the memory of the Civil War.
•Reading: Kirk Savage, “History, Memory, and Monuments: An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration,” National Park Service History E-Library (2006). Suggested additional reading: Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Gary W. Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), pp. 135-207; “Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, eds., Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003); Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Borritt, and Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
Afternoon: Seminar with Harold Holzer on the iconography of emancipation.
•Reading: Harold Holzer, “Picturing Freedom: The Emancipation Proclamation in Art, Iconography, and Memory,” in Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford, Frank J. Williams, The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), pp. 83-136. Suggested additional reading: Harold Holzer, Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Louis P. Masur, “The Emancipation Proclamation,” Essential Civil War Curriculum (Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech, 2010).
Group discussion with Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns, Gregory Downs, and David Jaffee on post-Civil War visual culture and its shaping of memory.
Participant project research/preparation (in Old York Library, Media Lab, or New York Public Library).
♦ Friday, July 20
Venue: The Graduate Center, CUNY
Presentations by all participants of their research or teaching projects, and discussion about future posting of completed projects online, conference papers, and other follow-up activities.
*Illustration: Winslow Homer, “Letter for Home,” Campaign Sketches, lithograph (Louis Prang & Co., 1863). American Antiquarian Society.
