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The mythmakers of US expansion have expressed “manifest destiny” in many different ways—and so have its many discontents. A multidisciplinary study that delves into these contrasts and contradictions, Inventing Destiny offers a broad yet penetrating cultural history of nineteenth-century US territorial acquisition—a history that gives voice to the underrepresented actors who significantly complicated US narratives of empire, from Native Americans and Anglo-American women to anti- and non-national expansionists. The contributors—established and emerging scholars from history, American studies, literary studies, art history, and religious studies—make use of source materials and te...
"A haunting voyage through the peculiar--and peculiarly American--world of human skull collecting. Ann Fabian's remarkable and moving study illuminates as few other works have the powerful hold that the dead and their remains continue to have upon the living". Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History.
"For the Winthrop collection's international debut exhibition, curators at the Fogg Art Museum of the Harvard University Art Museums, headed by Stephan Wolohojian, organized the selection and invited more than sixty specialists to write on artworks in their particular area of expertise. Works include such highlights in their creator's oeuvre as Jacques-Louis David's sketchbooks for The Coronation of Napoleon and the Crowning of Josephine, Theodore Gericault's Mutiny on the Raft of the Medusa, Vincent van Gogh's The Blue Cart, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's Odalisque with the Slave, William Blake's illustrations for the Divine Comedy, Dante Gabriel Rosetti's Blessed Damozel, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Silver. In addition, an essay by Wolohojian provides a fascinating and informative description of Winthrop and the growth of his collection."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This volume examines the ways in which attempts to define and delimit American nationhood effected imaginative and documentary conceptualizations of the Native American population. Far-reaching in its scope, both in terms of the period covered - roughly the period from the Declaration of Independence to the closing of the frontier - and in terms of the variety and kinds of documents examined, this study calls attention to the cultural and generic restraints that prevented visual and literary artists, as well as statesmen and community leaders, from adopting any position toward Native Americans other than a prejudicial one.
Artist-explorer John Mix Stanley (1814–1872), one of the most celebrated chroniclers of the American West in his time, was in a sense a victim of his own success. So highly regarded was his work that more than two hundred of his paintings were held at the Smithsonian Institution—where in 1865 a fire destroyed all but seven of them. This volume, featuring a comprehensive collection of Stanley’s extant art, reproduced in full color, offers an opportunity—and ample reason—to rediscover the remarkable accomplishments of this outsize figure of nineteenth-century American culture. Originally from New York State, Stanley journeyed west in 1842 to paint Indian life. During the U.S.-Mexican...
George Catlin's paintings and the vision behind them have become part of our understanding of a lost America. We see the Indian past through Catlin's eyes, imagine a younger, fresher land in his bright hues. But he spent only a few years in what he considered Indian country. The rest of his long life?more than thirty years?wasødevoted largely to promoting, repainting, and selling his collection?in short, to seeking patronage. Catlin and His Contemporaries examines how the preeminent painter of western Indians before the Civil War went about the business of making a living from his work. Catlin shared with such artists as Seth Eastman and John Mix Stanley a desire to preserve a visual record...
Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko. a figÂure wtm appeared to the outside worid as a commonplace Russian bureaucrat cut from the mold of a Gogol short story, was elevated in 1984 to the post of general secÂretary of the Communist party of the SoÂviet Union. Thus, a post held by such awesome, fearsome figures as Lenin and Stalin passed into the hands of someone perceived as a nondescript bureaucrat, deÂvoid of ideas or initiative, and crippled by old age and infirmity. A singular merit of this work is that it shows how far from the mark were these perceptions. This is the only full-length treatment of Chernenko. in contrast to the vast tomes written on his five predecessors as well a...
Between 1802, when the young Kentucky artist William Edward West began to paint portraits while on a downriver journey, and 1920, when the last of Frank Duveneck's students worked in Louisville, a large number of notable portrait artists were active in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley. In Lessons in Likeness: Portrait Painters in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley, 1802-1920, Estill Curtis Pennington charts the course of those artists as they painted a variety of sitters drawn from both urban and rural society. The work is illustrated, when possible, from The Filson Historical Society collection of some four hundred portraits representing one of the most extensive holdings available for st...
Focusing on intersecting issues of nation, race, and gender, this volume inaugurates new models for American literary and cultural history. Subjects and Citizens reveals the many ways in which a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writing contends with the most crucial social, political, and literary issues of our past and present. Defining the landscape of the New American literary history, these essays are united by three interrelated concerns: ideas of origin (where does "American literature" begin?), ideas of nation (what does "American literature" mean?), and ideas of race and gender (what does "American literature" include and exclude and how?). Work by writers as diverse as Aphr...