Picturing Reform: How Images Transformed America, 1830-1880

The Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) facilitates the use and understanding of popular images by scholars and their students in many disciplines — American studies, history, art history, and literature. Sessions at this summer seminar will focus on the history of print production in the eighteenth and nineteenth  centuries; interpreting portrait paintings, prints, and photographs; "reading" illustrations in popular journals; and related topics.

Re-Reading the Early Republic: From Crevecoeur to Cooper

Led by Wayne Franklin, Jeffrey Walker, and Lance Schachterle

"Re-reading the Early Republic" will explore the expansion of the press as an element in American public culture from the end of the Revolution to 1830. This was a period of remarkable growth in both the number and nature of items published and in the role of the press in public life. Paying particular attention to the practices of textual production as these evolved across the five decades, we shall be concerned with three key issues: