Prince and the other enslaved men had no fondness for their fetters and felt acutely the contradiction between American ideals and their condition.

Thinking back on the exhibit, I love how the curators concluded it with a statement on Black people’s desire to control or reclaim the narrative about them.

I was shocked to find that British newspapers in early August 1863 described the Portrait being “entirely destroyed” by fire on a railway train.

Confederates’ quest for bones thus connects to a bizarre history of the use, and misuse, of human remains. Bones from the Bull Run battlefield were taken as acts of domination and displayed as trophies of war. However macabre, human remains became part of the deeply variegated material culture of war.

The set of 552 images is impossible to describe as a single body of work, but the illustrations cohere.

“We the People” once had many ways of exercising their sovereignty besides those ordained and established in the Federal Constitution. […]

Precisely because images were so extensively braided into the milieu, their distinctive handlings of Americans in need or suddenly having to do with less—in other words, what these images did and did not show—were important in defining the Republic between the Revolution and the Civil War.

The painting suggests a work environment so deplorable that even the skilled, sober-minded, American-born workers have walked out.

Skilled slaves, North and South, worked in nearly every craft … but the fruits of their labor are often unmarked or uncritically attributed to their masters.

…without the bawdy world of Falstaff and Prince Hal and of Shakespeare’s jesters, beadles, and gravediggers or the hovering evil of murderous kings, corrupt priests, scheming witches, and ungrateful daughters there would have been nothing for those dissenting Puritans to dissent from.

There is a kind of actor who inhabits his role rather than himself. His true life takes place onstage.

The Stewart Children instances passionately held ideas about the common welfare structuring a painting that sought to have a moral and social impact on viewers.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Cartoonists manipulated the meaning of the revolution metaphor for their own mischievous designs.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Whatever the first amendment may say about the separation of church and state, religion has had a place in American politics, for better or worse, since the very founding of the nation.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Several cartoons from the presidential campaign of 1848 show Salt River as a foreboding obstacle for all who seek the nation’s highest office.

The racial agenda preserved in nineteenth-century print culture resonates with contemporary U.S.-Mexico relations.

If blackmail is ultimately about silence, and if silence cannot—by definition—be tracked, how is one to find signs that blackmail might be present?

“It is worth considering why Americans have invested their flags with such importance and how the United States has become more saturated with patriotic color than any other country in the world. The comparative intensity of American loyalties is less noteworthy than the country’s fixation on a single symbol, which has come to be associated with a remarkably wide range of emotions.”

Combining Revolutionary politics with the social and cultural valences of gender, race, class, nation, and power, this political cartoon serves as a multidimensional cipher which people at every knowledge level can participate in analyzing.

When they arrived in Virginia, Africans joined a society that was divided between master and white servant, a society with such contempt for white servants that masters were not punished for beating them to death.

The enthusiasm some sailors showed for reproducing American racial spectacle overseas suggests not only their own warm embrace of the era’s popular theatre, but also their aspiration to familiarize foreign societies with the nation’s cultural landscape.

On a frigid Boston night in January 1774, a crowd of American colonials tarred and feathered a hated customs official.

“Jefferson repeatedly relied on the common symbol of homespun, much as he wore the best clothes he could find while in France, but when he dressed even further down as president he knew that his slippers would be understood differently by different people.”

Next to Stephen Foster, William Henry Fry was arguably the most important American composer working before the Civil War.

In a dance, movement and steps are like words and sentences.

As much as Audubon drew attention to himself as an artist and man of science—and he did so ceaselessly and shamelessly—he also drew the attention of the American people to the richness and diversity of nature in America, helping them see it in national as well as environmental terms.

Along with the broadening of the palate came a taste for dining rooms suited to more epicurean appetites. Indeed, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the designated dining room had become a central fixture of the Victorian home.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

. . . assemblages of pictures in domestic installations—sometimes described as home altars—allow for the creation of a dream world or alternative visual environment from which the viewer can derive a complex web of meanings.

“Few places in American history have been so much to so many: a house for parents and children; a workplace for slaves and servants; and, for the Indians who journeyed there from as far as Nova Scotia and South Carolina, an embassy, a store, and a clearinghouse for news.”

While primly stitching Eve’s fall from innocence on her canvas, Christina likely reflected on the brutal consequences suffered by those who succumbed to temptation in her everyday world.

Here was a Bible that had not only come over on the Mayflower in 1620, but had belonged to some of the most prominent early settlers, according to annotations on its pages . . . Could it be true?

If history is any guide, the Treasury Department has an uphill fight ahead of it; counterfeiters have a knack for circumventing almost any obstacle put in their way.

Highly anticipated among scholars of American art and American cultural history alike, Wendy Bellion’s Citizen Spectator is among the most significant book-length […]

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“The anatomical museum was not just a transgressor of public morality, it was a notorious, flagrant transgressor, a public institution devoted to the display of things that should not be displayed.”

Cholera maps chart the movement of the disease, and the terror that accompanied it.

Nineteenth-century viewers were just as likely to envision war through the more personalized lens of the family album as through the battlefield.

“He exclaimed ‘Lobsters! I’ll make Cornwallis and his men lobsters!”

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

By changing the head, the coat, and the background building, the publisher could quickly produce a dignified presidential image with all the expected components of high office.

Growing increasingly three-dimensional and more ornate with every added layer of material, sentimental or “fancy” valentines, as they were called, were harbingers of hope, fondness, and desire.

Salisbury’s purchases clearly evoke the image of a young man concerned with meeting the expectations of Worcester’s privileged class.

Erotic standards are also historically contingent: what would have raised eyebrows in the eighteenth century often seems laughably tame, even quaint to the modern viewer.

It is not hard to imagine the allure of such a work for readers—modest or otherwise—for it provided a rare detailed discussion of sex.

Nineteenth-century Americans abandoned the traditional English phrasing of “standing” for election and begin to describe candidates who “run” for office. The race was on.

“[N]o matter how progressive, or how much it seemed to reflect a vibrant spirit of competition, of Darwinian triumph and bootstrap optimism, boxing still suffered from an image problem.”

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Peter Parker’s pickled paintings
Cause of nausea, chills & faintings”

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

How did the returned gaze of Chinese laborers function in relation to envisioned awareness of industrial speed?

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Even within itself, the China trade was a complex, multisided, many-splendored thing . . .

Rusert intervenes in narratives of racist pseudo-science, establishing not only a more inclusive history of early American science, but in doing so, arguing for a revision of the concept of the human.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

What would it be like to start off in life as a severely handicapped slave?

A strange and memorable thing. After outpourings of prayer, with the utmost fervor and fasting, there appeared an Angel, whose face shone like the noonday sun. His features were those of a man, and beardless; his head encircled by a splendid tiara; on his shoulders were wings; his garments were white and shining; his robe reached to his ankles; and about his loins was a belt not unlike the girdles of the peoples of the East.

The growing popularity of dolls had both ideological and pragmatic roots in the emerging middle class.

“At ninety dollars, they’re hardly cheap, and their price tag is part of their appeal. These are not intended to be superficial toys.”

Historians are finally coming to realize that diet, the production of and commerce in foodstuffs, and cookery are not only important but are actually defining characteristics of a nation’s culture.

The letters and diaries contained an abundance of rich material regarding the effects of shot and shell on the human body.

“Unlike West, Peale, and Trumbull, who gaze piercingly outward at viewers, Goodridge refuses a returning gaze, due not to modesty but to distraction.”

For Fisher as well as for Parsons making a self-portrait was, finally, an act of self-memorialization.

Nationalists […] aimed to rally Americans with the cry that the young nation could teach Old Europe a lesson or two about the industrial age on its own turf.

Man is the only picture-making animal in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of the earth has the […]

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

It was far less labor intensive—and therefore less expensive—for a painter or engraver to render a head than a full figure posed against an elaborate background.

Jasmine Nichole Cobb views early photography as an especially potent visual technology for the expression of black agency.

Hinman’s book was about the dirty, miserable, and joyful minutiae of soldier life in the Union army.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

[The County Election] also parodies the men in the crowd, who are divided…by the moral valence of their characters…

Constant attacks from weather, in addition to the mechanization of landscaping, conspire to destroy these stones as they once stood. Ironically, New England’s historic cemeteries are dying.

After spending the summer of 1890 in Venice, the American painter Thomas Moran boarded a steamship with a seemingly odd (and cumbersome) souvenir.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even in more recent times, international trade by sea simultaneously created conditions of intense isolation and exhilarating social interaction.

Impulsive and volatile, brave and rapacious, the pirates who came to life on the pages of Bucaniers of America served up an alternative model of manliness.

The ribbon holds enormous potential for students of American military and political culture during the American Revolution, as well as of eighteenth-century American art history.

Forest Leaves is a transitional volume: a collection that reflects Harper’s youth and schooling, but that is also already attuned to the fleeting nature of life, to the moral stain of slavery on the nation, and to many other “grown-up” topics.

Earl’s painting was not just a biography; it was a local history as well.

While our own culture shields itself from the prospect of death, our nineteenth-century forebearers embraced it.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“The timepiece boasted a calendar wheel and a moon dial, and it played seven tunes, one for each day of the week, and added a psalm for Sunday.”

What started out as just wanting to make a few paintings of whales ultimately became an eight-year project, with still no end in sight.

has had great power, and not just for colonial domination, yet one doesn’t want to reduce all minority communications history to the same story.

Sinéad Morrissey pays homage to revolution and to pattern-breaking, considered through a jigsaw puzzle mapping North America.

So who, in Parrot and Olivier in America, is Parrot?

1. Tracts Trace Fissure I pick up a fragile, aging photo, asking, “Who is this?” “No idea.” Names slip out […]

click for full list of links The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be […]

One particularly intriguing new feature is the “signature quilt” search function, which features name and location data for about fifty quilts with multiple signatures.

Imagine yourself seated around the table at a séance. Imagine having already committed to an ethereal mechanics of sympathy and […]

Americans expressed remorse for their lost place in the British empire and their dissatisfaction with the new political order of an independent democracy wrought by economic and moral conflict.

“Skin and Bones” invites visitors to contemplate what tattoos meant to the sailors who made the decision to use their skin as a canvas.

If self-serving performances of civility were common, so were misguided inferences from them.

I loved novels and short stories long before I loved the study of history. As a child, history came to […]

In the antebellum era, well after the fall of the international slave trade, American abolitionists consistently turned to the domestic auction block for propaganda

A critical awareness of the process of working, and sometimes failing, to conceptualize history and its possible futures, says Klein, is what the humanities can offer data visualization.

Trompe l’oeil invites us to undeceive ourselves of the fiction before us, and in so doing, it posits that the senses can detect and explain deception.

My generation of historians and curators has worked hard to claim a space for critical history in our museums and historic sites and, at the same time, to make our storytelling emotionally compelling.

This photograph of Abraham Lincoln and his son Thomas (Tad) was taken by Anthony Berger in Mathew Brady’s Washington, D.C. […]

James Kidder’s Market Street painting offers rich fodder for a meditation on the complex histories of private profit and public good in the cultural realm.

Beginning with Thomas’ initial gift of 2,650 titles, the research library currently boasts nearly 750,000 volumes, over 2 million newspaper issues, as well as large collections of periodicals, graphic arts, children’s literature, and manuscripts.

Culture in the Age of the […]

Artists painted these Indian men and women for a variety of reasons, but they began with diplomatic intentions.

In these galleries, the museum’s curators have been able to unite many of its familiar objects with less familiar ones that had formerly been relegated to storage, more than doubling what had been on view before.

“It is with great pain we observe a species of libel has already appeared in our country in imitation of the abominable and licentious practice of the lower English, commonly called caricature, in which the unhappy object of abuse is exposed to vulgar derision…”

Sloane’s embrace of the past ran counter to a stream of thought that was prominent from the beginning of European settlement in North America, one that held that the “New World” represented an opportunity to turn away from the past, and from the ruins and relics of Europe in particular.

Although menagerie owners emphasized the educational value of their exhibitions, they were clearly driven by economic rather than educational imperatives. Menageries were both capital-intensive and risky ventures.

When did the United States become a global force? A digital history project creates a space for answering this question.

Five unpublished letters (1825–1830) reveal the ornithologist’s dream and how he (almost) achieved it

Historical editors can never fully anticipate the needs of future historians, but hopefully with a growing respect for the full documentary record, including material that might, to some, be considered unimportant, editors will begin to add accounts, images, and other addenda and make them searchable, as the editors of the George Washington papers have done.

In the afterword to The Potter’s Hand, its author, A. N. Wilson, identifies the novel as a work of historical […]

Tricks a Girl Can Do Hannah Maynard (1834-1918) was a Canadian photographer whocreated surreal images after the death of her […]

“This study presents the kind of creative synthesis and thoughtful working-out of big ideas that will make it required reading. . . “

What role did trade play in connecting South Carolina to the greater Southeast? How were these economic exchanges understood and depicted? What type of information did trade offer the English? How were those far-reaching networks regulated?

Exploring the materiality of early American paintings and prints, Jennifer Roberts’ excellent new book spans the 1760s to the 1850s in three fascinating case studies, each involving the complex transport of art.

Work required Americans to keep a close eye on the natural world, for most still wrung a living from understanding and manipulating nature.

The neat separation of feminine and masculine spheres existed more as an ideal than as a fact.

Students can see how the virtue and nurturing nature of women is clearly reflected in the mother’s face and through the calm manner she exhibits as not one but two children demand her attention.

The Greeks were the cradle of the West. No others need apply.

Artists seemed to float above (or outside) the fray, but they certainly made hay in the shadow of the Revolution fixing the public memory of the event and its cast of characters.

If Mather’s portrait inspires reverence, another object associated with him helps bring him down a bit from his lofty position: his childhood highchair

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Jacob Perkins had invented a technology so elegant, and so perfect, that security printers would rely on it for the better part of two centuries.

While the lyrics conveyed forceful messages to the eighteenth-century public, the music also spoke to listeners.

Like countless other men of his generation, Bullard began his working life as an artisan and ended it as a businessman.

Given the facts, fiction and truths, what kind of autobiographical voice could I craft for the larger text that would establish the narrative provenance of a surviving pre-Civil War log cabin?

His descriptions of Poll were not as a bird in its own habitat, but as his companion.

I was struck by the thin pamphlet’s integration of word and image: in ten engravings, the booklet plotted out the life of the Christian soul.

Automatic Writing If, as the scholar claims, a photograph is a sudden death, if the historian’s citational practice is cousin […]

Economic panics are telling historical moments that reveal the structural complexities of the interdynamics between the global and local.

Keeping up with the news

The stereograph comes to America

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

“Visions of ineffable beauty and harmony, health and exhilaration of body and soul, and grand foundation lessons in Nature’s eternal love, are the sure reward of every earnest looker in this glorious wilderness.”—John Muir

Viewing this rare artifact was a great highlight in a journey that has consumed my life for the last six years.

The willy-nilly growth of the nation that had made its postal system a logistical marvel also required the establishment of a hub to process misdirected letters.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“When he first met them, Hesselius found Indians repulsive.”

Everything seemed blasted by a new, blank enormity. The world was too big to be beautiful.

To Find You III         [O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu House, Abiquiu, NM; present day] Bushes of mulberry, rosemary, cherry;trees of filbert, plum, and […]

In the 1820s, the idea of the traveler was in flux, a category that had come to encompass every itinerant from Joseph Banks, science officer of the Endeavour, to British lads on vacation.

An interesting close-reading of an illustration from Moses Roper’s slave narrative.

The actors who clawed their way to fame in the early decades of the American theater labored in an entrepreneurial industry that was far more reminiscent of prospecting for gold or financing merchant ships than it was of modern industrial production.

Two inches wide and eleven feet long, it mapped, among other things, a reunited nation.

Initially, the students tend to dwell on the explicit message of the spirituals. They assert that the spirituals focus on another world and encourage slaves to passively accept their fate . . . Gradually, the classroom dialogue shifts to the implicit messages.

Currier and Ives never intended to produce prints of great value. They sold their products for as little as fifteen cents and no more than three dollars. Rather than aspiring to have their work exhibited in the nation’s fine-art museums and galleries, they sought to have it hung on the walls of America’s homes, stores, barbershops, firehouses, barrooms, and barns.

The difficulty of making a good American Revolution movie has something to do with the challenge of finding a plot for the Revolution that can be arranged in the form of a family drama.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Because antebellum northern cities could be worrisome and puzzling, exactly because they were so incontestably changeful, and perhaps also because, as a result, urban vistas departed so dramatically from the iconic, reassuring visions of rural America—for such reasons, there was a generalized desire, indeed a broadly felt necessity, to develop firmer understandings of the urban milieu.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Complete atlases were scanned, as were covers for pocket maps, puzzles, and their cases. Folding globes were shown compressed and then opened, and maps were shown enclosed within books.”

Human love, not a wrenching religious conversion or spiritual journey, determined Johnston’s trajectory.

As the crisis intensified, the notion that each man assumed responsibility for his economic fate seemed increasingly flawed. Everyone, that is, was ready to claim credit for prosperity; none were willing to confess to personal failure.

A close examination of Josiah Warren’s utopian form of currency.

Narrative histories of action make us exceedingly conscious of the sequence of events over time. But time plays hide and seek in these small fragments.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Photographs did eventually replace wood engravings in illustration, but before that photography joined and transformed wood engraving so as to favor its claims as a fine art.

“In effect, the cemetery becomes a history laboratory where students can chart and graph gravestone styles and inscriptions according to the specific increments in time in which they first appear, reach the height of popularity, and finally fade out.”

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“How do we then account for the transition from curios to antiques? Why was the change in nomenclature and character so rapid?”

Well-meaning educators are often unwittingly sabotaging their lessons before they have a chance to get them off of the ground.

Los Angeles mirrored itself—magical and ordinary, artificial and real, blessed and damned—a dialectic of promotion that suited this prototypical culture industry, invoking truth and falsity…

In virtually every story, loyal slaves reminisce about the era of slavery, and bring harmony to postwar plantations by ushering Southern belles and good Yankee soldiers to reconciliation and matrimony.

This stamp pattern book opens up a rare glimpse into a small nineteenth-century American business, revealing just how many designs one man produced in his lifetime.

Actually, his recent body of work shows a remarkably textured, yet consistent, vision of American history.

… here are thirteen emerging early American scholars introducing a pre-1800 text available online to the public for free.

“So when we’ve lost our traditions we can come here and learn them from you.”

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Unlike the starving seamstress or the prostitute, both represented as victims of male commercial culture, the women trained as designers, wood engravers, and illustrators represented a new, respectable, potentially comfortable form of female industry.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

. . . scrapbooks created to save newspaper and magazine items often used few of the pictures from those publications. Perhaps pictures undercut the seriousness of a homemade object that mimicked the look of a book or newspaper.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Authenticity was always an important part of the freak show’s promotional rhetoric, which advertised exhibits as LIVE! TRUE! REAL! GENUINE! Despite such hyperbolic claims of veracity, the exotic act was the most easily and regularly fabricated of all attractions.”

Every museum has—must have—some unstated rules of inclusion, organization, and interpretation. But the musée du quai Branly’s rules seemed designed to undermine its own premises.

In [Grant’s] view, offered in the form of a press release issued for the painting’s public debut, the cherry-tree story was at once too good to be true and “too good to lose.”

In the Great Hall, there is such a sense of sameness in the men’s appearances that it does not take much effort to see that personality has been deliberately tamed for the sake of assembling an artificial society, a seamless superstructure open to being expanded, contracted, and reconfigured by house fiat.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Whom did state banks, which were primarily privately owned and operated, really represent? What did banknotes, whose value rested largely on trust, likewise represent?

The Scenographia Americana corresponded closely with imperial optimism in 1768.

Ward gives equal consideration to the historical evidence of text and image, reminding us that portraits are not just cultural commentary, but are in fact culture itself.

“As the war with Iraq loomed through the 2002-03 school year, we heard echoes from conflicts throughout U.S. history.”

Among artists and craftsman, Lovell notes how kinship and patronage were often closely aligned.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Taken together, Paris and Amsterdam throw into bold relief the radical nature of the nineteenth-century city.”

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

Anne Bradstreet was a deeply ambitious poet who was far from surprised by the publication of her first book.

Starting in the dining room, I stared blankly at the large gold-framed portrait of a young woman. Although I had walked past her a hundred times, I had never stopped to ask, “Who is she, the woman with knotted braids gracing her rose-tinted cheeks?”

We know a fair amount about theories of trial procedure, but scarcely anything about the courtrooms in which lawyers and judges practiced.

“People expect to find in American Memory every kind of historical documentation possible on every aspect of American history, and they communicate their surprise at discovering otherwise.”

“Given its unique origins and historical identity, the Smithsonian would seem to deserve protection not just from private exploitation but also from the rigid ideological prescriptions of some of its would-be defenders.”

“Even after a woman mastered painting’s technical skills and the theory that stood behind them, she encountered the nagging problem of publicity. A successful artist had to exhibit and advertise. She necessarily exposed herself to strangers as she drummed up a clientele and again when she sat down to capture their likenesses. The training needed to transform raw talent into polished style was beyond most women’s reach just as the demands of professional painting were at odds with the standards of feminine decorum.”

Electricity was one of the leading branches of experimental science in the Enlightenment, certainly the branch with the highest public profile owing to the proliferation of commercial entertainments after the 1740s, both in Europe and British America, where customers willingly paid for the novel experience of having the “electric fire” course through their bodies.

Author’s Note: As I hope will become readily apparent, The Hungry Eye is a work of historical fiction. Some of its characters […]

Author’s Note: As I hope will become readily apparent, The Hungry Eye is a work of historical fiction. Some of its characters […]

“People expect to find in American Memory every kind of historical documentation possible on every aspect of American history, and they communicate their surprise at discovering otherwise.”

“People expect to find in American Memory every kind of historical documentation possible on every aspect of American history, and they communicate their surprise at discovering otherwise.”

For Morse, life was one smear campaign and betrayal after another.

Why was this parent so frustrated when the site is full of primary sources? Because those sources too often had no context.

“Late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century mug books are collections of biographical sketches, a curiously rich source for genealogists and historians alike.”

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“For a kick I clicked on the description and viewed the item. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Young readers travel into the world of books with little or no luggage. They generally don’t have prior knowledge of the times.”

“Did the family-owned San Antonio printing company really print the paper money that helped finance the Mexican Revolution, as the current owner has heard rumored? Is the salty old New Englander right when he says that the whaling ship his grandfather skippered out of New Bedford sheltered escaped slaves among its crew?”

“If the many questions directed to a New York City history Website I co-supervise are any indication—including a certain befuddlement by visitors when they fail to locate information about events wholly invented in the film—audiences believe its story.”

“Public and private money spent amusing the millions with past-based reality television represents money not spent on other kinds of public-history experiments.”

“Stanford historian Jack Rakove, who serves as consultant, confesses, ‘If you ask from a historian’s vantage point, how does this correspond to contemporary scholarship? Well, probably, not that well. But if you ask, what is it that students of this age ought to be introduced to so that they have a rough idea of the Revolution, it’s actually pretty good.”

Like Wright’s, my trip to Ghana marked my first time in Africa and combined research with a spiritual homecoming.

“It was fear that he needed to cultivate, a necessary ingredient that had to be constantly attended to, like the feeding and grooming of the beauteous beasts in his kennel.”

“Two hundred years before the advent of computer technologies, Americans were already escaping into virtual reality.”

[T]his wasn’t a time to be an “objective historian.” This was a time to indulge, for a moment, the warm, vaguely melancholy feeling that comes from connecting to the past and to remember why I became an historian in the first place. And it was time to learn more.

“He would draw nothing tonight. He would exert not one smidgeon of pain or skill upon recording the scene or its actors. There was no point.”

“[I]n contrast to those who simply lament the decline of bourgeois institutions of public reflection (for example, the coffeehouse), Henkin puts forward a story about a public that succeeded–and in some ways exceeded–those earlier institutions.”

While the Founders of the United States have seen their reputations downgraded in some quarters over the past few decades, […]

While Davis’s erstwhile contention about the potential symbiosis between history and film is one that most of us can share conceptually, the history of the documentation of slavery as a subject for film is a sad and sorry one . . .

Why is there not a more detailed visual record of slavery and even slave life in early America?

Or How the Puritans Boogied Down, Down, Down Derry Down

“What Mount Vernon Love Story offers are not steamy sex scenes, of which there’s nary a one (was it the teeth?), but countless moments spent in the throes of hot, throbbing interior decorating.

“Too often reenactments come across as just what they are–half-hearted attempts to make history come alive in a dramatic way without using the elements that make for dramatic story-telling . . .”

Why do history in the form of a comic book? Why use this particular medium as opposed to others? What can the comic book offer in the presentation of the past that is unique and compelling?

McGrath’s skill in shaping characters and crafting prose is not to be denied. Whether he has transcended previous fictional attempts to make some sense of the American Revolution is another matter.

Far reaching in its range, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture” amasses a rich archive of textual material in print, sheet music, song, illustration, and film, allowing viewers to encounter the many faces of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Common-place is a common place for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. A bit friendlier than […]

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