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American Social History Project • Center for Media and Learning

2021 Schedule and Syllabus

*Please note: Except where indicated, session presentations will be viewed by Summer Scholars before daily activities via the institute website. Readings may change prior to the institute.

• Pre-institute reading: Louis P. Masur, The Civil War: A Concise History (New York, 2011); Eric Foner and Joshua Brown, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York, 2005); James W. Cook, “Seeing the Visual in U.S. History,” Journal of American History 95:2 (September 2008); Michael L. Wilson, “Visual Culture: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?,” in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, eds. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York, 2004).

Week One

Monday, June 28, 2021: Noon - 5pm (EDST)
Introductions / Visualizing Slavery and Anti-Slavery

Session 1 (live) – Institute overview. Principal faculty Brown, Burns, and Downs explain the institute’s curriculum and introduce their respective scholarly approaches to the study of the war and visual culture. Summer scholars introduce themselves.

[Break]

Session 2 (live) – Setting the Stage: The Second Slavery and The Second Anti-Slavery – Q & A with principal faculty Gregory Downs (presentation viewed previously).

  • Suggested reading: Corey M. Brooks, “Reconsidering Politics in the Study of American Abolitionists,” Journal of the Civil War Era 8:2 (June 2018): 291-317; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York, 2015), pp. 193-255; W. Caleb McDaniel, “The Bonds and Boundaries of Antislavery,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4:1 (March 2014); James Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting: Anti-Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2014), pp. 13-76; Manisha Sinha, "The Problem of Abolition in the Age of Capitalism: The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823, by David Brion Davis,” American Historical Review 124:1 (February 2019): 144–163.

[Break]

Session 3 (live) – Anti-slavery Imagery – Q & A with Maurie McInnis on the image of slavery and antislavery; and Slavery, Photography, Materiality – Q & A with Matthew Fox-Amato on photography, slavery, and abolition (presentations viewed previously).

  • McInnis Reading: Maurie D. McInnis, “Representing the Slave Trade,” in Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago, 2011), pp. 27-54
  • Fox-Amato Reading: John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York, 2015), Introduction (pp. ix-xxviii).

Tuesday, June 29, 2021: Noon - 5pm (EDST)
The War in Oil, Bronze, and Plaster

Session 1 (live) – “Behind the Scenes: The Metropolitan Museum of Art” – Q & A with Metropolitan Museum of Art curators on Civil War era works in the museum collection, including paintings, prints, sculpture, and photographs (presentation viewed previously).

  • Suggested Reading: Keith F. Davis, “‘A Terrible Distinctness’: Photography of the Civil War Era,” in Keith F. Davis, The Origins of American Photography, 1839-1885: From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate (Kansas City, 2007), pp. 173-205; Marcy J. Dinius, The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (Philadelphia, 2012); William Frassanito, Gettysburg: A Journey in Time (New York, 1975); Lucretia Hoover Giese, “‘Harvesting’ the Civil War: Art in Wartime New York,” in Redefining American History Painting, eds. Patricia Burnham and Lucretia Giese (Cambridge, 1995); Charmaine Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis, 2007), Chapter 5; Jeff L. Rosenheim, Photography and the American Civil War (New York, 2013); Kirk Savage, “Molding Emancipation: John Quincy Adams Ward’s The Freedman and the Meaning of the Civil War,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27:1 (2001), pp.  26-39.

[Break]

Session 2 (live) – The War in Oil, Bronze, and Plaster – Q & A with principal faculty Sarah Burns about Winslow Homer’s wartime and postwar paintings (presentation viewed previously).

  • Reading: Steven Conn and Andrew Walker, "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): 60-81.

[Break]

Participant conferences with institute faculty about projects (scheduled earlier).

Virtual social event.

Wednesday, June 30, 2021: Noon - 5pm (EDST)
Visualizing the Civil War Battlefront

Session 1 (live) – Maps as Visual Culture in the Civil War Era – Q & A with Susan Schulten on mapping the Civil War (presentation viewed previously).

  • Reading: Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: history and cartography in nineteenth-century America (Chicago, 2012): pp. 119-155 (156-202 optional).
    Note: all maps available in high resolution and color at www.mappingthenation.com –maps of Civil War era in chapter 4 and chapter 5.

[Break]

Session 2 (live) – Seeing the 1863 New York City Draft Riots – Q & A with principal faculty Joshua Brown on the illustrated journalism of the Civil War (presentation viewed previously).

  • Reading: Joshua Brown, "Illustrating the News," in Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 7-59.

Participant conferences with institute faculty about projects (scheduled earlier).

Thursday, July 1, 2021: Noon - 5pm (EDST)
Visualizing the Civil War Home Front

Session 1 (live) – “Behind the Scenes:  The American Antiquarian Society"and Visual Culture of the Home Front – Interactive workshop with Lauren Hewes on Civil War pictorial ephemera in the American Antiquarian Society collection  (presentation viewed previously).

  • Reading: Sarah Burns and Daniel Greene, “The Home at War, the War at Home: the Art of the Northern Home Front,” in Home Front. Daily Life in the Civil War North (Chicago, 2013), pp. 1-14.

[Break]

Session 2 (live) – Rise and Fall – Q & A with principal faculty Joshua Brown on the political cartoons of the Civil War (presentation viewed previously).

  • Reading: Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, 2001), pp. 195-224; Richard Samuel West, “Collecting Lincoln in Caricature” The Rail Splitter 1:3 (December 1995), pp. 15-17.

Participant conferences with institute faculty about projects (scheduled earlier).

Week Two

Monday, July 5, 2021: Noon - 5pm (EDST)
Visualizing the War in the West

Session 1 (live) – Reflections on the institute's first week with principal faculty Burns, Downs, and Brown.

[Break]

Session 2 (live) – Setting the Stage: Chronicle of a Death that Was Not Foretold: The End of Slavery and the Continuation of the Civil War – Q & A with principal faculty Gregory Downs (presentation viewed previously).

  • Suggested reading: Stephen V. Ash, Year in the South: 1865 (New York, 2004), pp. 127-182; Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, 2015); Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877 (New York, 1990), pp. 124-179; Stacey Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 2013); Lisa Tetrault, “Women’s Rights and Reconstruction,Journal of the Civil War Era; Kidada Williams, “The Wounds that Cried Out: Reckoning with African Americans’ Trauma and Suffering from Night Riding,” in Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, eds., The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill, 2015), 159-182; “Forum: The Future of Reconstruction Studies,” Journal of the Civil War Era.

[Break]

Session 3 (live) – Competing Legacies in the Civil War Era: Vanishing or Savagery – Q & A with Scott Manning Stevens on the visualization of the Native American Civil War (presentation viewed previously).

  • Reading: Scott Manning Stevens, “Other Homes, Other Fronts: Native America during the Civil War,” in Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North (Chicago, 2013).

Participant conferences with institute faculty about projects (scheduled earlier).

Tuesday, July 6, 2021: Noon - 5pm (EDST)
Visualizing Emancipation

Session 1 (live) – Setting the Stage: Reconstruction – Q & A with principal faculty Gregory Downs (presentation viewed previously).

  • Suggested reading: Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York, 1992), pp. 132-59, 409-37; Karen Cox, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (Chapel Hill, 2021); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1996), pp. 91-146; Steven Hahn, Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 1-114; Beth Lew-Williams, “Racism, Egalitarianism, and Asian Exclusion,” Reviews in American History 45:4 (December 2017): 627-633; Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 2004), pp. 3-50.

[Break]

Session 2 (live) –  Remembering American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in Post-Emancipation Advertisements – Q & A with Amanda Brickell Bellows on the visualization of emancipation in the U.S. and Russia (presentation viewed previously).

  • Reading: Amanda Bellows, "Advertisements and Ephmera," in American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination (Chapel Hill, 2020), pp. 152-185.

[Break]

Session 3 (live) –  Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery – Q & A with Barbara Krauthamer on visualizing freedom (presentation viewed previously).

  • Reading: Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (Philadelphia, 2013), pp. 58-127.

    Participant conferences with institute faculty about projects (scheduled earlier).

    Wednesday, July 7, 2021: Noon - 5pm (EDST)
    Visualizing Reconstruction

    Session 1 (live) – “Behind the Scenes: The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture” – Q & A with Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture curators/archivists on Reconstruction-era works in its collections.

    • Suggested Reading: Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 103-30; James Smethurst, “Emancipation Day: Postbellum Visions of African Americans in Currier & Ives Prints,” Imprint 31:2 (Autumn 2006); Peter H. Wood and Karen C. C. Dalton, Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years (Austin, 1988).additional readings TBA.

    [Break]

    Session 2 (live) –  Images in the Women's Suffrage Movement– Q & A with Allison Lange on the visual culture of woman's suffrage (presentation viewed previously).

    • Reading: Allison Lange, Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women's Suffrage Movement (Chicago, 2020), pp. 53-87.

    [Break]

    Session 3 (live) –  The African American Press and Jim Crow – Q & A with Jermaine Archer and Amanda Frisken on the Gilded Age African American press (presentation viewed previously).

    • Reading: Andrea N. Williams, “Cultivating Black Visuality: The Controversy over Cartoons in the Indianapolis Freeman,” American Periodicals 25:2 (2015).

    Participant conferences with institute faculty about projects (scheduled earlier).

    Week Three

    Monday, July 12, 2021: Noon - 5pm (EDST)
    The Long Reconstruction, The Lost Cause, Memory, and Jim Crow

    Session 1 (live) – Interactive workshop with principal faculty Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns, and Gregory Downs on researching and teaching the visual culture of Reconstruction.

    Session 2 (live) – Confederate Monuments and Nationalism – Q & A with Dell Upton on monuments, the Lost Cause, and the memory of the Civil War (presentation viewed previously).

    • Reading: Dell Upton, “Confederate Monuments and Nationalism."

    Participant conferences with institute faculty about projects (scheduled earlier).

    Tuesday, July 13, 2021: Noon - 5pm (EDST)
    Public History

    Session 1 (live) – Public History – Q & A with Louise Bernard, Turkiya Lowe, and Dominique Jean-Louis on recent and planned exhibitions, memorials, and museums addressing the history of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow.

    • Reading: William A. Blair, “Celebrating Freedom: The Problem of Emancipation in Public Commemoration,” in Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered, eds. William A. Blair and Karen Fisher Younger (Chapel Hill, 2009.

      [Break]

        Presentations by participants of their research or teaching projects - 1.

        Presentations by participants of their research or teaching projects - 2.

        [Break]

        Presentations by participants of their research or teaching projects - 3.

        Wednesday, July 14, 2021: Noon - 5pm (EDST)

        Presentations by participants of their research or teaching projects - 4.

        Presentations by participants of their research or teaching projects – 5.

        [Break]

        Presentations by participants of their research or teaching projects – 6.

        Session 1 (live) – With principal faculty Brown, Burns, and Downs summing up the institute’s proceedings and focus.

        Session 2 (live) – Wrap Up.

        Illustration: Winslow Homer, Letter for Home,” Campaign Sketches, lithograph (Boston: Louis Prang & Co., 1863). American Antiquarian Society.

        Civil War Summer Institutes