Books bear the imprint of our humanity, from the social and cultural means of their production to the notes written in their margins. And Indigenous books, embodying the marks, traces, and scars of colonial survival, are contested spaces. These publications, authored by Native Americans during the long nineteenth century, included a variety of nontextual components‒‒illustrations, typefaces, explanatory prefaces, appendices, copyright statements, author portraits, and more‒‒shaping how they were read and understood.

Alex Beringer delves into the surprising history of comic strips in America before the rise of the Sunday Funnies.  It’s a story that not only involves little-known artists and editors like Frank Bellew and T.W. Strong, but also some well-known names in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain.  Based on his new book, Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century US Comic Strip , Beringer reveals the variety and ambition of nineteenth-century American comic strips.

The linking of food to politics became increasingly popular from the mid-eighteenth century on as a means to communicate caution or approval of political structures and ideologies in America. Whether the colonies were referred to as a cake or a kettle of fish, the domestic language of food was easily understood and often appeared in print and visual culture. This seminar examines how and why a culinary vocabulary and food imagery developed and was employed as a widespread (though little studied) method of political/cultural/visual expression.

The 2017 CHAViC Summer Seminar will explore how American visual culture expressed ideas about race, specifically blackness and whiteness, across the long nineteenth century. Through lectures, readings, hands-on workshops, and group research, participants will learn how popular forms of visual culture have constructed racial identities in the United States and how looking can function as a racialized practice.

“All the world’s a stage,” wrote William Shakespeare, and so it seemed across the cultural landscape of the nineteenth-century United States. The 2022 Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) seminar will focus on visual and material cultures of theater and related histories of spectacle and spectatorship. Interdisciplinary in subject and scope, the seminar welcomes emerging and senior scholars across multiple fields.