Graphic arts historian John Bidwell discusses his new book The Declaration in Script and Print: A Visual History of America’s Founding Document (2024), which traces the fascinating history of the Declaration of Independence as both a work of art and a mass-market commodity during the nineteenth century.
In December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe, hid a fugitive slave in her house. While John Andrew Jackson stayed for only one night, he made a lasting impression. Drawing from this experience, Stowe began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most consequential books in American history and the novel that helped inspire the overthrow of slavery in the United States.
A joke is never just a joke, not even in the eighteenth century. In American Laughter, American Fury, Eran Zelnik offers a cultural history of early America that shows how humor among white men served to define and construct not only whiteness and masculinity but also American political culture and democracy more generally.
Join us for this Virtual Program as Zelnik traces the emerging bonds of affinity that white male settlers in North America cultivated through their shared, transformative experience of mirth.
In the course of her work at AAS, Laura Wasowicz, the Society's curator of children's literature, recovered the identities of the translator and illustrator of Good Wishes for the Children, a compilation of Hans Christian Andersen stories published in a limited, high-end edition by the Riverside Press in 1873 as a fundraiser for Boston Children’s Hospital. The illustrator was Sarah Gooll Putnam (1851–1912), an upper-class Bostonian who eventually enjoyed a successful career as a portraitist. This ambitious project was spearheaded by Putnam’s friend Adeline A.
Join us for a presentation by Wendy Bellion, Professor and Sewell C. Biggs Chair of American Art History and Director of the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware. Bellion will discuss the research she undertook using AAS collections for her recent book Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (fall 2019, out in paperback May 2020), which explores a history of material violence in Revolutionary New York. Bellion’s work traces acts of political iconoclasm and the return of destroyed things in visual representations and civic performances.
Through the emergence of women's studies programs in academic institutions in the past generation or two, many aspects of women's lives have been documented through publications and academic courses. The third conference of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture focuses not on women but on men. Looking at examples of visual materials of and for men is a way to look at a different gendered audience. In the literature on American graphic materials, little has been written about the audience for historical images. The papers presented at this conference begin to address this need.
Advertising, both as form and as practice, is everywhere in contemporary America. Billboards line our highways, Internet ads are tailored to suit our every search, and "Mad Men" cleans up during award season. It is one of the key elements of modern corporate capitalism. Advertising promotes familiar brands, introduces new technologies, and seeks to promote the consumer spending that has become the cornerstone of the American economy. From its economic impact to its aesthetic significance, mass-media advertising can be seen as helping shape what we think of as modernity itself.