Syllabus and Schedule of Activities

Dinner and reception at the Goddard Daniels House, 190 Salisbury Street (GDH)

Note: During the seminar, some sessions (GDH) will be devoted to presentations and discussions of themes and readings; the Council Room sessions in Antiquarian Hall (AH) will be hands-on sessions with library materials. There will be breaks in the mornings and afternoons between sessions at the Goddard Daniels House. Please read the articles on this syllabus. You will see that some are general background while others more specifically address various themes addressed by the faculty. There are also a few websites that we recommend you look at before coming to Worcester as they will be part of the discussions too.

Session II: Interpreting Images —Louis Masur (GDH)

-Readings-

Louis Masur, "Pictures Have Now Become a Necessity: The Use of Images in American History Text Books," Journal of American History, 85 (March 1998): 1409-24.
 

Malcolm Gladwell, "The Picture Problem," New Yorker, December 13, 2004, http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_12_13_a_picture.html
 

Session III: Parlor Culture and Bourgeois Sensibilities, David Jaffee (AH)

-Readings-

Katherine Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors and Upholstery Upholstery (Amherst, Mass., 1988): 19-58

Lauren Hewes. "'Dedicated to the lovers of art and literature,' The Cosmopolitan Art Association Engravings, 1856-1861." Imprint 31:2 (2006): 2-18.
 

David Jaffee, "John Rogers Take his Place in the Parlor" in John Rodgers: American Stories (Philip Wilson, 2011): 170-183.
 

Session VI: David Claypoole Johnston and the Image of Reform, Jack Larkin (GDH)

-Readings-

Clarence S. Brigham, "David Claypoole Johnston, the American Cruickshank," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 50 (April 1940): 98-110.
 

Jennifer Greenhill, "Playing the Fool: David Claypoole Johnston and the Menial Labor of Caricature," American Art 17, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 32-51
 

David Tatham, "David Claypool Johnston's Militia Muster," The American Art Journal 19.2 (Spring 1987): 4-15
 

Session IX: Lithography, Georgia Barnhill (AH)

-Readings-

Sally Pierce, "Early American Lithography: Images to 1830," in Early American Lithography by Sally Pierce, Catharina Slautterback and Georgia Brady Barnhill (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1997), 9-23.
 

Georgia B. Barnhill, "The Pictorial Context for Nathaniel Currier: Prints for the Elite and Middle Class," Imprint, vol. 31 (Autumn 2006)
 

Michael Clapper, "'I War Once a Barefoot Boy!': Cultural Tensions in a Popular Chromo" American Art 16:2 (Summer 2002): 16-39.
 

Session X: Antislavery and Antiabolition, Joshua Brown (GDH)

-Readings-

Phillip Lapansky, "Graphic Discord: Abolitionist and Antiabolitionist Images," in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women.s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca, 1994), 201-30.
 

Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., "The Art of the Antislavery Movement," in Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston, ed. Donald M. Jacobs (Bloomington, 1993), 47-73.

Sarah Burns and Josh Brown, "White Into Black: Seeing Race, Slavery, and Anti-Slavery in Antebellum America http://picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu/mtr.php

Session XI: Images of Emancipation, Masur (AH)

-Readings-

Harold Holzer, "Picturing Freedom: The Emancipation Proclamation in Art, Iconography, and Memory," in Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford, Frank J. Williams, The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), pp. 83-136
 

Session XII: Photographic Processes, Lauren Hewes (AH)

-Readings-

Wendy Wick Reaves and Sally Pierce, "Translations from the Plate: The Marketplace of Public Portraiture," Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes (Rochester, NY: George Eastman House, 2005), 89-103.

Session XIII: Photography and War, Masur

-Readings-

Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, pp. 71-118
 

Keith Davis, "A Terrible Distinctiveness: Photography of the Civil War Era," in Photography in Nineteenth-Century America
 

Session XIV: Women's Reform Movements, Amy Richter

-Readings-

Ewell Newman, "Graceful Vines, Common Scolds, and Shameless Devils: The Image of Woman in Nineteenth-Century American Historical Prints," Imprint (1981): 2-18.
 

Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920," The American Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 3 (Jun., 1984), 620-647.
 

Amy G. Richter, "At Home Aboard: The American Railroad and the Changing Ideal of Public Domesticity," in Gender and Landscape: Renegotiating Morality and Space, Lorraine Dowler, Josephine Carubia, and Bonj Szczygiel, ed. (Routledge, 2005) pp 77-93.
 

Lizabeth Cohen, "Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885-1915," Journal of American Culture 3 (Winter 1980), 752.775.
 

Session XVI: Workshop: Images of Reform, Masur

-Readings-

Baird Jarman. "The Graphic Art of Thomas Nast: Politics and Properiety in Postbellum Publishing," American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 20:2, 156-189.
 

Session XVII: Jacob Riis and How the Other Half Lives, Masur (CR)

-Readings-

Gregory S. Jackson, "Cultivating Spiritual Sight: Jacob Riis's Virtual Tour Narrative and the Visual Modernization of Protestant Homiletics," Representations, 83:1 (Summer 2003), 126-166.
 

Carol Quirke. "Picturing the Poor: Jacob Riis's Reform Photography," Reviews in American History, 36:4, December 2008, 557-565.