As an elderly man, John Adams remembered how the thirteen colonies united as one as a miraculous event. "Thirteen Clocks were made to strike together—a perfection of mechanism which no artist had ever before effected," he remembered in 1818. But for too long, Robert Parkinson argues, we have discounted the role race played in the "miraculous" moment of American independence.
The third historical society in the nation, the American Antiquarian Society played an influential role in the formation of historical culture and consciousness in the early United States, laying the groundwork for professional practices that are still embraced today: collection policies, distinctions between preservation of textual and nontextual artifacts, publication programs, historical rituals and commemorations, reconciliation of scholarly and popular approaches, and more.
This program will examine the lives and works of three artists—Martha Ann Honeywell, Sarah Rogers, and Saunders Kew Grems Nellis—who worked at the intersection of visual art, performance, and disability in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Born with significant physical disabilities, these artists traveled throughout North and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe creating and selling silhouettes and performing their unexpected capacities and incapacities for customers. Historian Laurel Daen and artist Marianne R.
At the height of the American Civil War in 1863, the Union instated the first-ever federal draft. In Patriotism by Proxy, Colleen Boggs develops a new understanding of the connections between American lives and American literature by focusing on this historic moment when the military transformed both. Paired with the Emancipation Proclamation, the 1863 draft inaugurated new relationships of the nation to its citizens and of citizens to one another. The draft laid bare social divisions when wealthy draftees hired substitutes as proxies to serve in their stead.
The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and circulated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in image technologies—daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes-de-visite, and steam printing presses—enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for Black rights. Dr.