The Visual Culture Of The American Civil War - An NEH Summer Institute for College & University Teachers

Institute Schedule and Syllabus

Pre-institute reading: 
Louis P. Masur, The Civil War: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 1-61; James W. Cook, “Seeing the Visual in U.S. History,” Journal of American History 95:2 (September 2008).

Week One

♦ Monday, July 7
**Sessions at Graduate Center, CUNY.

Welcome, introductions, institute overview, scheduling of participant conferences with principal faculty, and orientation to GC facilities and resources. Principal faculty (Brown, Burns, Downs, and Jaffee) explains the institute’s curriculum, introduces his/her own scholarly approach to the study of the war and visual culture. Institute participants introduce themselves and their projects.

Session with Alice Fahs on the visual landscape of the Civil War era.

♦ Tuesday, July 8
**Day’s sessions at Graduate Center, CUNY.

Morning: Session with Sarah Burns and Joshua Brown on history and art history methods and interdisciplinary opportunities in researching and teaching the Civil War.

• Reading: Michael L. Wilson, “Visual Culture: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?,” in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Session with Lynne Bassett on the fabric, clothing, and cloth of war.

• Reading: Madelyn Shaw & Lynne Bassett, Homefront & Battlefield: Civil War Quilts in Context (Lowell: American Textile History Museum, 2012), pp. 2-11, 110-45.
• Suggested additional reading: Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), pp. 146-53; Frederick C. Gaede, “The ‘Danish Exchange’ US Army Blanket,” Military Collector & Historian 36.2 (Summer 1984); Frederick C. Gaede, The Federal Civil War Shelter Tent (Alexandria, VA: O’Donnell Publications, 2001); Mary Edna Lohrenz and Anita M. Stamper, Mississippi Homespun: Nineteenth Century Textiles and the Women Who Made Them (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1989); Dean E. Nelson, “The Union ‘Army Standard Size and Make’ Shirt,” Military Collector & Historian 47.3 (Fall 1995); Stephen E. Osman, “A Tale of Two Shirts,” Military Collector & Historian 45.2 (Summer 1993); Stephen E. Osman, “Army Drawers in the Civil War,” Military Collector & Historian 74.3 (Fall 1995); Mark R. Wilson, “The Extensive Side of Nineteenth-Century Military Economy: The Tent Industry in the Northern United States during the Civil War,” Enterprise & Society 2 (June 2001).

Working lunch: Group discussion of institute readings.

Afternoon: Participant research time.

Conference sessions with institute faculty about participants’ projects (scheduled earlier).

Evening dinner with all participants.

♦ Wednesday, July 9
**Day’s sessions at Brooklyn Historical Society.

Morning: Session with Deborah Willis and Mary Niall Mitchell on Civil War photography of the war front and home front.

• Reading: Keith F. Davis, “‘A Terrible Distinctness‘: Photography of the Civil War Era,” in Photography in Nineteenth Century America, 1839-1900, ed. Martha Sandweiss (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1991), pp. 130-79.
• Suggested additional reading: Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012); Alan Trachtenberg,Reading American Photographs: Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), pp. 71-118; Michael L. Carlebach, The Origins of Photojournalism in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), pp. 62-101; William Frassanito, Gettysburg: A Journey in Time (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975); Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young, Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Marcy J. Dinius, The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 154-232.

Tour of Brooklyn Historical Society and hands-on activities.

Afternoon: Session with Joshua Brown on the illustrated journalism of the Civil War.

• Reading: William Fletcher Thompson, “Illustrating the Civil War,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 45 (Autumn, 1961); Jan Zita Grover, “The First Living-Room War: The Civil War in the Illustrated Press,”Afterimage (February 1984).
• Suggested additional reading: William Fletcher Thompson, The Image of War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1959); Harry L. Katz and Vincent Virga, Civil War Sketch Book: Drawings from the Battlefront (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); Judith Bookbinder and Sheila Gallagher, eds., First Hand: Civil War Era Drawings from the Becker Collection (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2009); Kathleen Diffley, “Splendid Patriotism: How theIllustrated London News Pictured the Confederacy,” Comparative American Studies 5:4 (2007); Andrea G. Pearson, “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly: Innovation and Imitation in Nineteenth-Century American Pictorial Reporting,” Journal of Popular Culture 23:4 (Spring 1990); Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 7-59.

Conference sessions with institute faculty about participants’ projects (scheduled earlier).

♦ Thursday, July 10
**Day’s sessions at Bard Graduate Center.

Morning: Session with Maurie McInnis on the image of slavery and antislavery.

• Reading: Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 27-54; Phillip Lapansky, “Graphic Discord: Abolitionist and Antiabolitionist Images,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 201-30.
• Suggested additional reading: Richard J. Powell, “Cinqué: Antislavery Portraiture and Patronage in Jacksonian America,” American Art 11:3 (Fall 1997); Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., “The Art of the Antislavery Movement,” in Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston, ed. Donald M. Jacobs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (New York: Verso, 2000); Jonathan Prude, “To Look upon the ‘Lower Sort’: Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America, 1750-1800,” Journal of American History 78:1 (June 1991); Michael A. Chaney, “Heartfelt Thanks to Punch for the Picture: Frederick Douglass and the Transnational Jokework of Slave Caricature,” American Literature 82:1 (March 2010); Nell Irvin Painter, “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and Becoming Known,”Journal of American History 81.2 (September 1994); Colin L. Westerbeck, “Frederick Douglass Chooses His Moment,” in African Americans in Art: Selections from the Art Institute of Chicago, ed. Susan F. Rosen (Chicago, 1999), 9-25.

Conference sessions with institute faculty about participants’ projects (scheduled earlier).

Afternoon: Session with Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns, Gregory Downs, and David Jaffee on the image of emancipation.

• Reading: Harold Holzer, “Picturing Freedom: The Emancipation Proclamation in Art, Iconography, and Memory,” in Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford, Frank J. Williams, The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), pp. 83-136.
• Suggested additional reading: Eric Foner and Joshua Brown, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); Marcus Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Harold Holzer,Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Mary Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).

Conference sessions with institute faculty about participants’ projects (scheduled earlier).

♦ Friday, July 11
**Day’s sessions at Graduate Center, CUNY.

Morning: Participant research time.

Working lunch: Group discussion of institute readings.

Afternoon: Session with Richard Samuel West on Civil War political cartoons.

• Reading: Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865, pp. 195-224; William Fletcher Thompson, The Image of War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War, pp. 165-78; Richard Samuel West, “Collecting Lincoln in Caricature” The Rail Splitter 1.3 (December 1995), pp. 15-17.
• Suggested additional reading: William Fletcher Thompson, “Pictorial Images of the Negro during the Civil War,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 48:4 (Summer 1965); Christopher Kent, “War Cartooned/Cartoon War: Matt Morgan and the American Civil War in Fun and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,” Victorian Periodicals Review 36:2 (Summer 2003); Gary L.  Bunker, From Rail-Splitter to Icon: Lincoln’s Image in Illustrated Periodicals, 1860-1865 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2001); Gary L. Bunker and John Appel, “‘Shoddy,’ Anti-Semitism, and the Civil War,” American Jewish History 82:1-4 (1994); Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Borritt, and Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984); Cameron C. Nickels, Civil War Humor (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010).

Workshop surveying online Civil War photography, pictorial press, and cartoon archives in the Graduate Center digital lab with David Jaffee and Donna Thompson Ray.

• Web archive examples: Selected Civil War Photographs (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress): http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwphome.html; Mathew Brady Civil War Photographs (National Archives Flickr project): http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/collections/72157622495226723/; Drawings of the American Civil War Era (Becker Collection, Boston College): http://idesweb.bc.edu/becker/; The Civil War in America from the Illustrated London News (Becker Center, Emory University): http://beck.library.emory.edu/iln/index.html; Bernard F. Reilly, Jr. American Political Prints, 1776-1876: Catalog of the Collection of the Library of Congress (Prints and Photographs Division): http://loc.harpweek.com/; Northern Visions of Race, Region, and Reform (American Antiquarian Society): mac110.assumption.edu/aas/default.html; Abraham Lincoln Cartoons: Comic Portraits of His Presidency (HarpWeek): http://www.abrahamlincolncartoons.com/.

♦ Monday, July 14
**Day’s sessions at Graduate Center, CUNY.

Morning: Participant research time.

Working lunch: Group discussion of institute readings.

Afternoon: Session with Kirk Savage on commemorative sculpture and monuments and the memory of the Civil War.

• Reading: Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp 162-208.
• Suggested additional reading: Kirk Savage, “History, Memory, and Monuments: An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration,” National Park Service History E-Library (2006); Gary W. Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), pp. 135-207; “Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, eds., Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003); Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Borritt, and Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); William A. Blair, “Celebrating Freedom: The Problem of Emancipation in Public Commemoration,” in Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered, ed. William A. Blair and Karen Fisher Younger (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

Workshop in the Graduate Center digital lab with Donna Thompson Ray and David Jaffee exploring tools and programs that enhance research and teaching the Civil War, and a group consideration of classroom activities authored by participants.

♦ Tuesday, July 15
**Day’s sessions at New-York Historical Society.

Morning: Session with Jeanie Attie on women and the Civil War home front.

• Reading: Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp.198-219; Judith Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 45-67, 68-91.
• Suggested additional reading: Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Kate Roberts Edenborg and Hazel Dicken-Garcia, “The Darlings Come Out to See the Volunteers: Depictions of Women in Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War,” in Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19^th Century Press, ed. David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Roy Morris, Jr. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2000); Gary L. Bunker, “Antebellum Caricature and Woman’s Sphere,” Journal of Women’s History 3:3 (Winter 1992); Mark E. Neely, Jr., and Harold Holzer, “Victims, Stoics, and Refugees: Women in Lost Cause Prints,” in Graphic Arts and the South: Proceedings of the 1990 North American Print Conference, ed. Judy L. Larson (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993).

Tour of New-York Historical Society and hands-on activities.

Afternoon: Seminar with Lauren Hewes and David Jaffee on women, pictorial ephemera, and the home front during the Civil War

• Reading: Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 93-149.
• Suggested additional reading: Georgia B. Barnhill, “The Pictorial Context for Nathaniel Currier Prints for the Elite and Middle Class,” Imprint 31:2 (Autumn 2006); E. McSherry Fowble, Currier & Ives and the American Parlor,” Imprint 15:2 (Autumn 1990; Elliot Bostwick Davis, “The Currency of Culture: Prints in New York City,” in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861, ed. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Nina Silber, “Intemperate Men, Spiteful Women, and Jefferson Davis,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Mark E. Neely and Harold Holzer, The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Steven R. Boyd, Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); James M. Schmidt, Lincoln’s Labels: America’s Best Known Brands and the Civil War (Roseville, MN: Edinborough Press, 2009).

Conference sessions with institute faculty about participants’ projects (scheduled earlier).

♦ Wednesday, July 16
**Day’s sessions at Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Morning: Sessions with Sarah Burns on painting the war.

• Reading: Sarah Burns and John Davis, ed., American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 511-541; Christopher Kent Wilson, “Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field: A Study of the Harvest Metaphor and Popular Culture,” American Art Journal(Autumn 1985).
• Suggested additional reading: Steven Conn and Andrew Walker, “The History in the Art: Painting the Civil War,” in “Terrain of Freedom: American Art and the Civil War,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27 (2001); Lucretia Hoover Giese, “‘Harvesting’ the Civil War: Art in Wartime New York,” in Redefining American History Painting, ed. Patricia Burnham and Lucretia Giese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Steven Conn, “Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting, or Why Are These Pictures So Terrible?,” History and Theory 41 (December 2002); Julian Grossman, Echo of a Distant Drum: Winslow Homer and the Civil War (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1974); Marc Simpson, ed., Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1988); Peter H. Wood, Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Harold Holzer and Mark E. Neely, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art (New York: Orion, 1993).

 Afternoon:Participant research time.

 Conference sessions with institute faculty about participants’ projects (scheduled earlier).

♦ Thursday, July 17
**Day’s sessions at Graduate Center, CUNY.

Morning: Session with Megan Kate Nelson on the vision of total war.

• Reading: Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), pp. 160-227.
• Suggested additional reading: J. T. H. Connor and Michael Rhode, “Shooting Soldiers, Civil War Medical Images, Memory, and Identity in America,” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 5 (Winter 2003); Maura Lyons, “An Embodied Landscape: Wounded Trees at Gettysburg,” American Art 26:3 (Fall 2012)’ Kathy Newman, “Wounds and Wounding in the American Civil War: A (Visual) History,” Yale Journal of Criticism 6: 2 (Fall 1993); L. M. Herschbach, “Prosthetic Reconstructions: Making the Industry, Remaking the Body, Modeling the Nation,” History Workshop Journal 44 (1997); Blair Rogers and Michael Rhode, “The First Civil War photographs of soldiers with facial wounds,” Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 19 (1995).

Session with Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns, Gregory Downs, and David Jaffee on post-Civil War visual culture and its shaping of memory.

• Reading: Eric Foner and Joshua Brown, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp.34-40, 68-75, 101-06, 150-55, 181-88, 214-24.
• Suggested additional reading: Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1876-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Peter H. Wood and Karen C. C. Dalton, Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988); Gregg D. Kimball, “‘The South as It Was’: Social Order, Slavery, and Illustrators in Virginia, 1830-1877,” in Graphic Arts and the South: Proceedings of the 1990 North American Print Conference, ed. Judy L. Larson (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993); James Smethurst, “Emancipation Day: Postbellum Visions of African Americans in Currier & Ives Prints,”Imprint 31:2 (Autumn 2006); Kathleen Diffley, “Home on the Range: Turner, Slavery, and the Landscape Illustrations in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1861-1876,” Prospects 14 (1989).

Working lunch: Group discussion of institute readings.

Afternoon: Presentations by participants of their research or teaching projects.

♦ Friday, July 18
**Day’s sessions at Graduate Center, CUNY.

Presentations by participants of their research or teaching projects, and discussion about future posting of completed projects online, conference papers, and other follow-up activities.

 

*Illustration: Winslow Homer, “Letter for Home,” Campaign Sketches, lithograph (Louis Prang & Co., 1863). American Antiquarian Society.