September 9, 2013
Karl Jacoby: The Contest for the Continent
Karl Jacoby, Columbia UniversityCUNY Graduate CenterMay 7, 2013 In this 35 minute talk, historian Karl Jacoby complicates the story of the history of North America by presenting the history of the Plains Indians through the perspective of multiple revolutions in the late eighteenth century: the expansion of the Spanish empire along the west coast and […]
April 23, 2013
Josh Freeman: Teaching the New Deal
Joshua Freeman, Murphy Institute for Labor Studies, City University of New YorkCUNY Graduate Center, March 7, 2013 In this 45 minute talk, historian Josh Freeman describes how the New Deal expanded and fundamentally changed the role of government in American life, and why the Great Depression triggered such profound change when previous economic crises hadn’t. […]
March 12, 2013
Peter H. Wood: Blacks in the Civil War through the Eyes of Winslow Homer
Peter H. Wood, Duke UniversityNewark MuseumJuly 12, 2012 Peter Wood, emeritus professor of history at Duke University, discusses the career of Winslow Homer and his portrayals of African Americans during the Civil War. While many of Homer’s drawings and paintings appear nonpolitical, Wood argues that his training at Harper’s Weekly as a news illustrator prepared him […]
January 14, 2013
Cynthia Mills: Civil War Monuments
Cynthia Mills, The Smithsonian American Art MuseumCUNY Graduate CenterJuly 19, 2012 In this forty-five minute talk, Cynthia Mills (1947-2014) the former executive editor of American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and co-editor of Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscape of Southern Memory traces the arc of Civil War commemorative […]
January 4, 2013
Martha Sandweiss: Is There Anything More to See?
Martha A. Sandweiss, Princeton UniversityCivil War @ 150: Is There Anything More to See?CUNY Graduate CenterNovember 3, 2011 In this thirteen minute presentation, historian Martha Sandweiss challenges assumptions and some of the uses of Civil War photographs as historical documents. Although biased, unreliable, and unrepresentative, the images are mostly used as illustrations of events. While […]
January 3, 2013
Anthony Lee: Is There Anything More to See?
Anthony Lee, Mount Holyoke CollegeCivil War @ 150: Is There Anything More to See?CUNY Graduate CenterNovember 3, 2011 In this 15 minute talk, art historian, curator, and photographer Anthony Lee provocatively examines Civil War era photography by way of one case study. The discovery, in June 2010, of a supposedly rare carte-de-visite depicting two African-American […]
January 3, 2013
Mary Niall Mitchell: Is There Anything More to See?
Mary Niall Mitchell, University of New OrleansCivil War @ 150: Is There Anything More to See?CUNY Graduate CenterNovember 3, 2011 In this seventeen minute talk, historian Mary Niall Mitchell uses less known and difficult to understand photographs to discuss the use of photography as propaganda during the Civil War. Abolitionists knew that they needed to […]
October 17, 2012
Civil War Photography on the Battlefront and on the Homefront
In this hour-long presentation, Anthony Lee, professor of art history at Mount Holyoke College, talks about the broad range and types of photographs taken during the American Civil War and ponders why some have received so much more attention than others. This talk was part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, a […]
May 15, 2012
The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture and America’s Most Famous Opera
Ellen Noonan, American Social History ProjectInterviewed by Andrea Ades VásquezApril 16, 2012 Created by George Gershwin and Du Bose Heyward and sung by generations of black performers, the opera Porgy and Bess has been both embraced and reviled in its long life. In this 22 minute interview, historian Ellen Noonan describes how the show played […]