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.
The 2019 Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) Summer Seminar will explore the intersection of American visual culture, propaganda, and politics, broadly defined, in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War.
“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.
Led by Laurel Daen and Jennifer Van Horn
Abigail Kelley Foster (1811-1887), noted antislavery partisan and women’s rights advocate, was an active correspondent and lecturer on behalf of reform movements in the middle of the nineteenth century. She was married to Stephen Symonds Foster (1809-1881).
The American Antiquarian Society has a collection of fifty-six photographs depicting life in and around Tuskegee Institute, in Tuskegee, Alabama, ca. 1890-1915, taken by an unknown photographer. The campus, now known as Tuskegee University, is depicted here during the tenure of the school’s first president Booker T. Washington. Under Washington's leadership, students learned trades while also constructing the school's buildings brick by brick.
Hawaiiana at the American Antiquarian Society includes an assortment of more than thirty rare engravings produced by students at the Lahainaluna Seminary on the island of Maui. An intaglio press was introduced at this institution about 1834 and was used to teach students the skills of copperplate engraving and printing. The students produced maps, landscape views, portraits, and depictions of native floral.
The history of America has always been intimately entwined with the history of communications media—and that has always been changing. This exhibition broadly explores the interconnectedness of American news media, in all its formats, with changes in technology, business, politics, society, and community from 1730 to 1865.
This online exhibition effectively creates a digital archive of several Algonquian-language printed books and pamphlets, or wussukwhonk as they are called in the Nipmuc language. The manuscript collections featured here include town records, land deeds, and account books.
This exhibition tells the story of Prang during the height of his career in chromolithography during the second half of the nineteenth century.
