May 3, 2016
Envisioning Emancipation: The Black Image and Civil War Photography
In this presentation, photography historian Deborah Willis, and historian Barbara Krauthamer discuss the use of portrait photography as historical evidence. Together they examine several photographs of African Americans in the era of the U.S. Civil War, before and after emancipation; and analyze the evidence in the images in terms of the fundamental influence of African Americans, […]
May 3, 2016
Richard West: Civil War Political Cartoons
Richard Samuel West, historian of cartoons and popular publications and founder of New England’s Periodyssey, discusses the range of topics in and formats of political cartoons published during the Civil War and delineates how the medium changed over the course of the conflict. This talk took place on July 16, 2012, as part of The […]
October 30, 2015
Prints and Pictorial Ephemera at the Homefront during the Civil War
Georgia Barnhill, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts at the American Antiquarian Society, discusses the methods, meanings, and uses of various types of printed Civil War ephemera, and how they were used to document, memorialize and shape public opinion about the war on the home front. This talk took place on July 17, 2012, […]
October 30, 2015
Harold Holzer: Iconography of Emancipation
Harold Holzer, chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and the author of numerous books on Lincoln and the Civil War, talks about the visual representations of the emancipation proclamation as well as the images of Abraham Lincoln as emancipator. This talk took place on July 19, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of […]
October 30, 2015
Seeing the Civil War: Artists, the Public, and Pictorial News and Views
Joshua Brown, Executive Director of the American Social History Project and Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, discusses the pictorial journalism of the Civil War and the ways battlefront artists covered the conflict before photography could document warfare. This talk took place on July 11, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of […]
October 30, 2015
Rending and Mending: The Flag, the Needle, and the Wounds of War
Sarah Burns, the Ruth N. Halls Professor of the History of Art (emerita) at Indiana University, provides an in-depth analysis of Lilly Martin Spencer’s “Home of the Red, White, and Blue.” She places the painting within the broader visual context of women, veterans, and the flag during the U.S. Civil War. This talk took place […]
October 30, 2015
Jeanie Attie: Women in the Civil War
Jeanie Attie, professor of history at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, provides a sweeping overview of the roles and images of women during the Civil War. She discusses northern and southern women and the ways the war shifted notions of domesticity and women’s public space. This talk took place on July 17, […]
October 30, 2015
Josh Brown: Images of the 1863 New York City Draft Riots
Joshua Brown, Executive Director of the American Social History Project and Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, presents a case study of interpreting a historical event through images. He examines images of the 1863 New York City draft riots from a range of pictorial newspapers in order to piece together the changing nature […]
October 30, 2015
Alice Fahs: Visual Landscape of the Civil War Era
Alice Fahs, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, presents a broad range of images that made up the visual landscape of the 1860s and explores how the Civil War did and did not transform the dominant images especially for African Americans and women. This talk took place on July 9, 2012, as […]