Please note: All of the assigned readings are tentative.

• Pre-institute reading: Louis Masur, The U.S. Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (New York, 2020); Henry Louis Gates, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York, 2019); 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, July 10, 2023 – Sessions at Graduate Center
Introductions / Visualizing Slavery and Anti-Slavery

Session 1 – 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.

Working lunch - Summer scholars introduce themselves and their projects.

Session 2 – Setting the Stage: The Second Slavery and The Second Anti-Slavery: Principal faculty Gregory Downs.

• 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; W. Stephanie M. H. Camp, “The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830-1861,” Journal of Southern History 68:3 (2002), 533–72; Caleb McDaniel, “The Bonds and Boundaries of Antislavery,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4:1 (March 2014); 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; Deirdre Cooper Owens, "Introduction: American Gynecology and Black Lives” and Chapter Three: “Slavery, Sex, and Medicine" in Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology ( Athens, 2017); 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.

Session 4 – The Image of Slavery and Antislavery: Aston Gonzalez.

• Reading: Maurie D. McInnis, “Representing the Slave Trade,” in Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago, 2011).

Session 5 - Photography, Slavery, and Abolition: Matthew 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.

Group dinner.

Tuesday, July 11 – Sessions at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The War in Oil, Bronze, and Plaster

Session 1 - Reflections on the previous day.

Session 2 - Winslow Homer’s Wartime and Postwar Paintings: Principal faculty Sarah Burns.

• Reading: Eleanor Harvey, “Introduction,” The Civil War in American Art, (Washington, D. C., Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2021); Lucretia Giese, “Winslow Homer’s Prisoners from the Front: an American History Painting?” in Marc Simpson, ed., Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War (San Francisco, 1988); Sarah Burns and John Davis, eds., American Art to 1900 (Berkeley, 2009): “The War and the Artist,” “History Painting and the War,” Winslow Homer’s Prisoners from the Front,” John Quincy Adams Ward’s The Freedman.

Lunch on own.

Session 3 - Metropolitan Museum curators on Civil War era works in the museum collection, including paintings, prints, sculpture, and photographs

• 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); 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).

Participant research time or conferences with Met curators and/or institute faculty about projects (scheduled earlier).

Wednesday, July 12 - Sessions at New York Public Library and Graduate Center
Visualizing the Civil War Battlefront

Session 1 - Reflections on the previous day.

Session 2 - Mapping the Civil War: Susan Schulten.

• 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.

Working lunch: Group discussion of institute readings / Lunch conversation Susan Schulten.

Session 3 - Civil War Illustrated Journalism: Principal faculty Joshua Brown. [Lecture and Workshop]

• Reading: Joshua Brown, “Illustrating the News,” in Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley, 2002).

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

Thursday, July 13 – Sessions at New-York Historical Society
Visualizing the Civil War Home Front

Session 1 - Reflections on the previous day.

Session 2 - Women, Pictorial Ephemera, and the Civil War Home front: Lauren Hewes.

• Reading: Adam Goodheart, “Forward – Picturing War,” and 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).

Alternating sessions:

Session 3 - Hands-on activity with representative prints in the New-York Historical Society collection.

Session 4 - Civil War Political Cartoons: Joshua Brown.

• 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).

Working lunch: Group discussion of institute readings / Lunch conversation with Lauren Hewes and Joshua Brown.

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

Friday, July 14 – Sessions at Graduate Center
Visualizing Emancipation / The War in the West

Session 1 - Reflections on the previous day.

Session 2 - Setting the Stage: Chronicle of a Death that Was Not Foretold: The End of Slavery and the Continuation of the Civil War: Gregory Downs.

• 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); Gregory P. Downs, Scott Nesbit, Mapping Occupation [www.mappingoccupation.org]: “Force, Freedom and the Army in Reconstruction;” Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877 (New York, 1990), pp. 124-179; Stephanie Kingsley, “Plotting Freedom: Data Mapping Leads To New Visions of Reconstruction,” Perspectives on History (October 2015); 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 [online forum]; 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); “Forum: The Future of Reconstruction Studies,” Journal of the Civil War Era [www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/forum-the-future-of-reconstruction-studies].

Session 3 - The Visualization of Emancipation: Heather Williams.

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

Working lunch: Group discussion of institute readings / Lunch conversation with Heather Williams and Scott Stevens.

Session 4 - The Visualization of the Native American Civil War: Scott Manning Stevens.

• 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 research time or conferences with institute faculty about projects (scheduled earlier).

Week Two

Monday, July 17 – Sessions at New York Public Library and Graduate Center
Reconstruction 1

Morning – Session at New York Public Library:
Session 1 - Session with curators about the New York Public Library’s holdings in its print, photo, and picture collection on the Civil War, Reconstruction, and their aftermaths.

• Suggested reading: Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 103-30; Eric Foner and Joshua Brown, Forever Free: The Story of Emanicipation and Reconstruction (New York, 2005) ; 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).

Return to The Graduate Center:
Session 2 - Reflecting on the first institute week: Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns, Gregory Downs, and Donna Thompson Ray.

Session 3 – Setting the Stage: Reconstruction: Gregory Downs.

• 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); Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 2004), pp. 3-50.

Session 4 - The Visual Culture of Reconstruction and Shared and Distinctive Approaches in Art History and History: Sarah Burns and Joshua Brown.

• Reading: TBA.

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

Tuesday, July 18 - Walking tour of Morningside Park/Riverside Drive and sessions at Graduate Center
Reconstruction 2

Morning:
Session 1 - Walking tour of New York City Civil War-related public sculpture: Michele Bogart.

• Suggested reading: Sarah Beetham, “‘An Army of Bronze Simulacra’: The Copied Soldier Monument and the American Civil War,” Nierika: : Revista de Estudios de Arte 4:7 (January-June 2015); Michele Bogart, “Enrichment, Affirmation, Order,” in Sculpture in Gotham: Art and Urban Renewal in New York City (London, 2018); Leigh Fought, “Afterlife,” in Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (New York); Richard Wightman Fox, Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History (New York, 2015); Kirk Savage, “History, Memory, and Monuments: An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration,” National Park Service History E-Library (2006); Joan Waugh, U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (Chapel Hill, 2009).

Return to The Graduate Center: 
Working lunch: Group discussion of institute readings / Lunch conversation with Donna Thompson Ray about photography and African American education.

• Suggested reading: Sarah Bassnett, “From Public Relations to Art: Exhibiting Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton Institute Photographs,” History of Photography 32:2 (Summer 2008); Shawn Michelle Smith, “Photographing the American Negro,” in American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, 1999); Shawn Michelle Smith, “Photography on the Color Line” and “Envisioning Race,” in Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, 2004); Heather Williams, “‘We Are Striving to Do Business on Our Own Hook’: Organizing Schools on the Ground’” and “‘If Anybody Wants an Education, It Is Me’: Students in Freedpeople’s Schools” in Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill, 2005).

Session 2 - Reflections on the previous day.

Participant research time or conferences with institute faculty (scheduled earlier).

Wednesday, July 19 - – Sessions at Graduate Center
Legacies, the Lost Cause, and Memory

Session 1 – Reflections on the previous day.

Session 2 -  Monuments, the Lost Cause, and the Memory of the Civil War: Hilary Green.

• Reading: TBA.

Session 3 - Post-Civil War African American Art and Artists: Amy Mooney.

• Reading: Sarah Kelly Oehler, “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Charles White’s Murals and History as Art,” Charles White: A Retrospective (New Haven, 2018), 21-37.

Working lunch: Group discussion of institute readings / Lunch conversation with Hilary Green and Amy Mooney.

Final participant research time.

Thursday, July 20 - Sessions at Graduate Center
History and the Public / Summer Scholars Presentations

Session 1 - Reflections on previous day.

Session 2 - Exhibitions, Memorials, and Museums Addressing the the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow: Louise Bernard, Turkiya Lowe, and Dominique Jean-Louis.

• 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.

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

Session 4 / Working lunch: Presentations by participants of their research or teaching projects.

Session 5 - Presentations by participants of their research or teaching projects.

Group dinner.

Friday, July 21 – Sessions at Graduate Center
Summer Scholar Presentations / Summing Up

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

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

Session 3 /Working lunch: Final presentations by participants of their research or teaching projects, and discussion about future posting of completed projects online, conference papers, and other follow-up activities.

Session 4 - Summing up the Institute’s Proceedings and Focus: Donna Thompson Ray, Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns, and Gregory Downs.