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.

General Background Reading:

Louis P. Masur, The Civil War: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011

James M. McPherson, "What's the Matter with History," in Drawn in the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (New York, 1997).

James W. Cook, "Seeing the Visual in U.S. History," Journal of American History 95 (September 2008): 432-441.

Session II: Orienting the Week—Visualizing the War
Josh Brown (GDH)

Session III: Photographing the War—Technology and Processes
Lauren Hewes (AH)

-Reading-

Keith F. Davis, "'A Terrible Distinctness': Photography of the Civil War Era," in Photography in Nineteenth Century America, 1839-1900, ed. Martha Sandweiss (New York, 1991).

Session IV: Photography of the War—Reception
David Jaffee, Bard Graduate Center (AH)

-Reading-

Anthony W. Lee, "The Image of War," in Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young, On Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (Berkeley: University of Cailfornia Press, 2007), 8-51.

Session V: What they Wore: Textiles and The War
Lynne Z. Bassett, curator and textile historian (GDH)

-Reading-

Madelyn Shaw & Lynne Bassett, Homefront & Battlefield: Civil War Quilts in Context (Lowell, Mass.: American Textile History Musuem), 2012.

Session VIII: Slavery/Anti-slavery
Josh Brown (GDH)

-Reading-

Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago, 2011), 27-54.

Session IX: Pictorial Press
Josh Brown (GDH)

-Reading-

William Fletcher Thompson, "Illustrating the Civil War," Wisconsin Magazine of History 45 (Autumn 1961).

Jan Zita Glover, "The First Living-Room War: The Civil War in the Illustrated Press," Afterimage (February 1984).

The Becker Collection: Drawings of the American Civil War Era
http://idesweb.bc.edu/becker/

Session X: Mapping the War
Debra Block, Norman B. Levanthal Map Center, Boston Public Library (GDH)

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/civil_war_maps/cwmintro.html

Session XI: Reflections and Discussion on the previous day/Context for day's session
(GDH)

Session XII: Political Cartoons of the Civil War: Lithographed Prints
Richard West, Historian (GDH)

Session XIII: Political Cartoons of the Civil War: Pictorial and Comic Press
Richard West, Historian (AH)

Rufus Wilson, Lincoln in Caricature (Horizon Press, 1953), Introduction.

Gary Bunker, From Rail-Splitter to Icon (Kent State, 2001), Chapter 2: "The Development of Lincoln's in Periodicals."

Richard Samuel West, "Collecting Lincoln in Caricature" The Rail Splitter, Vol. 1, No. 3 (December 1995), 15-17.

Session XV: Reflections and Discussion on the previous day/Context for day's session
(GDH)

Session XVI: Ephemera of the War
Georgia Barnhill and Josh Brown (AH)

-Reading-

Alice Fahs, The Imagine Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South (Chapel Hill, 2001), 195-224.

Mark E. Neely Jr. and Harold Holzer, The Union Image (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), Chapter 3: "The Domestic Blockade"

Session XVII: Painting the Civil War
Patricia Hills, professor of art history, Boston University (GDH)

Steven Conn and Andrew Walker, "The History in the Art: Painting the Civil War," Art Institute of Chicago Musuem Studies, vol. 27, no 1, Terrain of Freedom: American Art and the Civil War (2001), 60-81, 102-103.

Patricia Hills, "Cultural Racism: Resistance and accommodation in the Civil War Art of Eastman Johnson and Thomas Nast," Seeing High & Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, (2006), 103-123.

Session XIX: Emancipation Imagery
Josh Brown (AH)

-Reading-

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 XX: Memory and Prints
Josh Brown and Georgia Barnhill (AH)

-Reading-

Kirk Savage, "History, Memory, and Monuments: An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration," National Park Service History E-Library (2006)
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/resedu/savage.htm

Gregory M. Pfitzer, Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagination (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), "Eyewitness to History"