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American Social History Project • Center for Media and Learning

Institute Schedule and Syllabus

Pre-institute reading

Winslow Homer, The Letter for HomeLouis P. Masur, The Civil War: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); 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; James W. Cook, “Seeing the Visual in U.S. History,” Journal of American History 95:2 (September 2008).

Week One

Monday, July 7

Sessions at Graduate Center, CUNY.

Welcome, introductions, institute overview, scheduling of participant conferences with principal faculty, and orientation to GC facilities and resources. Principal faculty (Brown, Burns, Downs, and Jaffee) explains the institute’s curriculum, introduces his/her own scholarly approach to the study of the war and visual culture. Institute participants introduce themselves and their projects.

Session with Alice Fahs on the visual landscape of the Civil War era.

Tuesday, July 8

Day’s sessions at Graduate Center, CUNY.

Morning: Session with Sarah Burns and Joshua Brown on history and art history methods and interdisciplinary opportunities in researching and teaching the Civil War.

  • Reading: Joshua Brown, “Towards a Meeting of the Minds: Historians and Art Historians” and Patricia Hills, “Brickbats in Tandem: An Art Historian’s Response,” American Art 17:2 (Summer 2003): pp. 4-12.
  • Suggested additional 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).

Session with Lynne Bassett on the fabric, clothing, and cloth of war.

  • Reading: Madelyn Shaw & Lynne Bassett, Homefront & Battlefield: Civil War Quilts in Context (Lowell: American Textile History Museum, 2012), pp. 2-11, 110-45.
  • Suggested additional reading: Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), pp. 146-53; Stephen E. Osman, “Army Drawers in the Civil War,” Military Collector & Historian 74.3 (Fall 1995).
  • Additional bibliography: Frederick C. Gaede, “The ‘Danish Exchange’ US Army Blanket,” Military Collector & Historian 36.2 (Summer 1984); Frederick C. Gaede, The Federal Civil War Shelter Tent (Alexandria, VA: O’Donnell Publications, 2001); Mary Edna Lohrenz and Anita M. Stamper, Mississippi Homespun: Nineteenth Century Textiles and the Women Who Made Them (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1989); Dean E. Nelson, “The Union ‘Army Standard Size and Make’ Shirt,” Military Collector & Historian 47.3 (Fall 1995); Stephen E. Osman, “A Tale of Two Shirts,” Military Collector & Historian 45.2 (Summer 1993); Mark R. Wilson, “The Extensive Side of Nineteenth-Century Military Economy: The Tent Industry in the Northern United States during the Civil War,” Enterprise & Society 2 (June 2001).

Working lunch: Group discussion of institute readings.

Afternoon: Participant research time.

Conference sessions with institute faculty about participants’ projects (scheduled earlier).

Evening: dinner with all participants.

Wednesday, July 9

Day’s sessions at Brooklyn Historical Society.

Morning: Session with Deborah Willis and Mary Niall Mitchell on Civil War photography of the war front and home front.

  • Reading: Keith F. Davis, “‘A Terrible Distinctness’: Photography of the Civil War Era,” in Photography in Nineteenth Century America, 1839-1900, ed. Martha Sandweiss (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1991), pp. 130-79.
  • Suggested additional reading: Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), pp. 71-118; Megan Kate Nelson, “The Pleasures of Civil War Ruins,” in Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges, ed. Stephen Berry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), pp. 36-53.
  • Additional bibliography: Michael L. Carlebach, The Origins of Photojournalism in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), pp. 62-101; Marcy J. Dinius, The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 154-232; 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); Mary Niall Mitchell, “‘Rosebloom and Pure White,’ Or So It Seemed,” American Quarterly 54:3 (2002): 369-410; Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012).

Tour of Brooklyn Historical Society and hands-on activities.

Afternoon: Session 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: 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.
  • Additional bibliography: Judith Bookbinder and Sheila Gallagher, eds., First Hand: Civil War Era Drawings from the Becker Collection (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2009); Kathleen Diffley, “Splendid Patriotism: How the Illustrated London News Pictured the Confederacy,” Comparative American Studies 5:4 (2007); William E. Huntzicker, “Picturing the News: Frank Leslie and the Origins of American Pictorial Journalism,” in The Civil War and the Press, ed. David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Debra Reddin van Tuyll (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2000); Harry L. Katz and Vincent Virga, Civil War Sketch Book: Drawings from the Battlefront (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); Andrea G. Pearson, “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly: Innovation and Imitation in Nineteenth-Century American Pictorial Reporting,” Journal of Popular Culture 23:4 (Spring 1990); William Fletcher Thompson, The Image of War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1959).

Conference sessions with institute faculty about participants’ projects (scheduled earlier).

Thursday, July 10

Day’s sessions at Bard Graduate Center.

Morning: Session with Maurie McInnis on the image of slavery and antislavery.

  • Reading: Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 27-54; Phillip Lapansky, “Graphic Discord: Abolitionist and Antiabolitionist Images,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 201-30.
  • Suggested additional reading: John Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South and Urban Slavery in Washington, DC,” Art Bulletin (March 1998): pp. 67-92; Richard J. Powell, “Cinqué: Antislavery Portraiture and Patronage in Jacksonian America,” American Art 11:3 (Fall 1997).
  • Additional bibliography: Michael A. Chaney, “Heartfelt Thanks to Punch for the Picture: Frederick Douglass and the Transnational Jokework of Slave Caricature,” American Literature 82:1 (March 2010); Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade; Nell Irvin Painter, “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and Becoming Known,” Journal of American History 81.2 (September 1994); Jonathan Prude, “To Look upon the ‘Lower Sort’: Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America, 1750-1800,” Journal of American History 78:1 (June 1991); Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., “The Art of the Antislavery Movement,” in Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston, ed. Donald M. Jacobs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Colin L. Westerbeck, “Frederick Douglass Chooses His Moment,” in African Americans in Art: Selections from the Art Institute of Chicago, ed. Susan F. Rosen (Chicago, 1999), 9-25; Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (New York: Verso, 2000).

Conference sessions with institute faculty about participants’ projects (scheduled earlier).

Afternoon: Session with Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns, Gregory Downs, and David Jaffee on the image 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: Martha S. Jones, “Emancipation’s Encounters: The Meaning of Freedom from the Pages of Civil War Sketchbooks,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 3:4 (December 2013): 533-48; Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South (New York: Random House, 2013), pp. 107-140.
  • Additional bibliography: Harold Holzer, Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Mary Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 2008); James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), Chapters 9 and 10; Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Marcus Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).

Conference sessions with institute faculty about participants’ projects (scheduled earlier).

Friday, July 11

Day’s sessions at Graduate Center, CUNY.

Morning: Participant research time.

Working lunch: Group discussion of institute readings.

Afternoon: Session 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, pp. 195-224; William Fletcher Thompson, The Image of War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War, pp. 165-78; Richard Samuel West, “Collecting Lincoln in Caricature” The Rail Splitter 1.3 (December 1995), pp. 15-17.
  • Suggested additional reading: 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).
  • Additional bibliography: Gary L. Bunker, From Rail-Splitter to Icon: Lincoln’s Image in Illustrated Periodicals, 1860-1865 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2001); Gary L. Bunker and John Appel, “‘Shoddy,’ Anti-Semitism, and the Civil War,” American Jewish History 82:1-4 (1994); 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); William Fletcher Thompson, “Pictorial Images of the Negro during the Civil War,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 48:4 (Summer 1965).

Workshop surveying online Civil War photography, pictorial press, and cartoon archives in the Graduate Center digital lab with David Jaffee and Donna Thompson Ray.

Week Two

Monday, July 14

Day’s sessions at Graduate Center, CUNY.

Morning: Participant research time.

Working lunch: Group discussion of institute readings.

Afternoon: Session with Kirk Savage on commemorative sculpture and monuments and the memory of the Civil War.

  • Reading: Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 129-160.
  • Suggested additional reading: Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 1-104; Thomas Brown, “The Confederate Battle Flag and the Desertion of the Lost Cause Tradition,” in Remixing the Civil War: Meditations on the Sesquicentennial, ed. Thomas Brown (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp. 37-72; Micki McElya, “Commemorating the Color Line: The National Mammy Monument Controversy of the 1920s,” in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, ed. Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003).
  • Additional bibliography: Kirk Savage, “History, Memory, and Monuments: An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration,” National Park Service History E-Library (2006); 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); William A. Blair, “Celebrating Freedom: The Problem of Emancipation in Public Commemoration,” in Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered, ed. William A. Blair and Karen Fisher Younger (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

Workshop in the Graduate Center digital lab with Donna Thompson Ray and David Jaffee exploring tools and programs that enhance research and teaching the Civil War, and a group consideration of classroom activities authored by participants.

Tuesday, July 15

Day’s sessions at New-York Historical Society.

Morning: Session with Jeanie Attie on women and the Civil War home front.

  • Reading: Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp.198-219; Judith Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 45-67, 68-91.
  • Suggested additional reading: Kate Roberts Edenborg and Hazel Dicken-Garcia, “The Darlings Come Out to See the Volunteers: Depictions of Women in Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War,” in Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19th Century Press, ed. David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Roy Morris, Jr. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2000).
  • Additional bibliography: Gary L. Bunker, “Antebellum Caricature and Woman’s Sphere,”Journal of Women’s History 3:3 (Winter 1992); 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); Mark E. Neely, Jr., and Harold Holzer, “Victims, Stoics, and Refugees: Women in Lost Cause Prints,” in Graphic Arts and the South: Proceedings of the 1990 North American Print Conference, ed. Judy L. Larson (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993).

Tour of New-York Historical Society and hands-on activities.

Afternoon: Seminar with Lauren Hewes and David Jaffee 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: Sarah Burns and Daniel Greene, “The Home at War, the War at Home: The Visual Culture of the Northern Home Front,” in Peter John Brownlee, et. al., Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp.1-11; David Jaffee, “John Rogers Takes His Place in the Parlor,” in John Rogers: American Stories, ed. Kimberly Orcutt (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2010), pp. 167-79.
  • Additional bibliography: Georgia B. Barnhill, “The Pictorial Context for Nathaniel Currier Prints for the Elite and Middle Class,” Imprint 31:2 (Autumn 2006); Steven R. Boyd, Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); Elliot Bostwick Davis, “The Currency of Culture: Prints in New York City,” in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861, ed. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); E. McSherry Fowble, “Currier & Ives and the American Parlor,” Imprint 15:2 (Autumn 1990; Mark E. Neely and Harold Holzer, The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); James M. Schmidt, Lincoln’s Labels: America’s Best Known Brands and the Civil War (Roseville, MN: Edinborough Press, 2009); 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).

Conference sessions with institute faculty about participants’ projects (scheduled earlier).

Wednesday, July 16

Day’s sessions at Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Morning: Sessions with Sarah Burns on painting the war.

  • Reading: Sarah Burns and John Davis, ed., American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 511-541; Christopher Kent Wilson, “Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field: A Study of the Harvest Metaphor and Popular Culture,” American Art Journal (Autumn 1985).
  • 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 (2001).
  • Additional bibliography: Steven Conn, “Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting, or Why Are These Pictures So Terrible?,” History and Theory 41 (December 2002); Lucretia Hoover Giese, “‘Harvesting’ the Civil War: Art in Wartime New York,” in Redefining American History Painting, ed. Patricia Burnham and Lucretia Giese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Julian Grossman, Echo of a Distant Drum: Winslow Homer and the Civil War (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1974); Harold Holzer and Mark E. Neely, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art (New York: Orion, 1993); Marc Simpson, ed., Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1988); Peter H. Wood, Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Afternoon: Participant research time.

Conference sessions with institute faculty about participants’ projects (scheduled earlier).

Thursday, July 17

Day’s sessions at Graduate Center, CUNY.

Morning: Session with Megan Kate Nelson on the vision of total war.

  • Reading: Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), pp. 1-9, 160-227.
  • Suggested additional reading: 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).
  • Additional bibliography: Maura Lyons, “An Embodied Landscape: Wounded Trees at Gettysburg,” American Art 26:3 (Fall 2012); L. M. Herschbach, “Prosthetic Reconstructions: Making the Industry, Remaking the Body, Modeling the Nation,” History Workshop Journal 44 (1997); Kathy Newman, “Wounds and Wounding in the American Civil War: A (Visual) History,” Yale Journal of Criticism 6: 2 (Fall 1993); Blair Rogers and Michael Rhode, “The First Civil War photographs of soldiers with facial wounds,” Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 19 (1995).

Session with Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns, Gregory Downs, and David Jaffee on post-Civil War visual culture and its shaping of memory.

  • Reading: Eric Foner and Joshua Brown, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp.34-40, 68-75, 101-06, 150-55, 181-88, 214-24.
  • Suggested additional reading: Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), Prologue and Chapter 6.
  • Additional bibliography: Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); Kathleen Diffley, “Home on the Range: Turner, Slavery, and the Landscape Illustrations in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1861-1876,” Prospects 14 (1989); 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 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993); Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1876-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); 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: University of Texas Press, 1988).

Working lunch: Group discussion of institute readings.

Afternoon: Presentations by participants of their research or teaching projects.

Friday, July 18

Day’s sessions at Graduate Center, CUNY.

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.

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

Civil War Summer Institutes