It has long been assumed that early America lacked a vibrant visual culture, but the printed record indicates another reality, one that has often been ignored by historians of the book and others. In this presentation, Georgia Barnhill will share some of her research about the production and reception of illustrations for poetry and fiction. In particular Barnhill will explain the challenging issues that faced nineteenth-century publishers and some of those facing researchers today.

Three quite different approaches to industrialization took place in Lowell, Springfield, and Worcester in the 19th century. Lowell relied on the growth of gigantic cotton mills and a single product, cotton cloth. Springfield’s development was catalyzed by the federal government’s investment in an Armory that developed the technologies required for the manufacture of interchangeable parts.

Join us as scholar Ron Tyler discusses his latest publication Texas Lithographs: A Century of History in Images. Westward expansion in the United States was deeply intertwined with the technological revolutions of the nineteenth century, from railroads to telegraphy. Among the most important of these, if often forgotten, was the lithograph. Before photography became a dominant medium, lithography—and later, chromolithography—enabled inexpensive reproduction of color illustrations, transforming journalism and marketing and nurturing, for the first time, a global visual culture.

Antebellum slave narratives have taken pride of place in the American literary canon. Once ignored, disparaged, or simply forgotten, the autobiographical narratives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other formerly enslaved men and women are now widely read and studied. One key aspect of the genre, however, has been left unexamined: its materiality. What did original editions of slave narratives look like? How were these books circulated? Who read them?

In an age when we are hyperaware of global warming, we tend to speak of ecological crises in global terms, representing environments through international comparison and webs of interdependency. Yet it is easy to forget how recent this development is, when just two decades ago catastrophes such as pollution were framed with specific attention to immediate contexts. Even the idea of shared national environmental concerns is relatively recent, suggesting that we should pay attention to how writing before the twentieth century reflected a sense of place.