ASHP has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to host a two-week institute for college and university faculty in July 2020 on the visual media of the American Civil War and its aftermath. The institute (in its fifth iteration) will expand study on the ways the war was recorded and remembered through an array of visual media -- including the fine arts, photography, cartoons, prints -- and a range of “ephemeral” pictorial items and publications. Institute participants will work with leading scholars in the field and take part in hands-on workshops in local museums and archives. Sessions will explore photography and slavery; painting the war; illustrated journalism; Reconstruction; American Indian resistance during the war; emancipation; and memorialization and memory, among others. Institute activities will introduce the rich body of scholarship related to Civil War and postwar era visual culture, encourage further research in the field, and assist participants in developing approaches that use visual evidence to enhance teaching and learning the history of the Civil War era.

Check back later this fall to apply!