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In this volume, Tanya Sheehan takes humor seriously in order to trace how photographic comedy was used in America and transnationally to express evolving ideas about race, black emancipation, and civil rights in the mid-1800s and into the twentieth century.
Sheehan employs a trove of understudied materials to write ......
In the summer of 1876, Berlin anxiously awaited the arrival of what was billed as the most gigantic ape known to zoology. Described by European explorers only a few decades earlier, gorillas had rarely been seen outside of Africa, and emerging theories of evolution only increased the public's desire to see this monster with human features. ......
Race, Transatlantic Culture, and the Arts in the Civil War Era
In his best-selling travel memoir, The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain punningly refers to the black man who introduces him to Venetian Renaissance painting as a contraband guide, a term coined to describe fugitive slaves who assisted Union armies during the Civil War. By means of this and similar case studies, Paul H. D. Kaplan ......
Out in Central Pennsylvania tells the unique and relatively unknown story of the LGBTQ community in central Pennsylvania. Drawing from oral histories and historical documents, this book describes how gender and sexual minorities built community and social networks in a culturally conservative region. ......
The Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantaï (19222008) is best known for abstract, large-format works produced using pliage: the painting of a crumpled, gathered, or systematically pleated canvas that the artist then unfolds and stretches for exhibition. In her study of this profoundly influential artist, Molly Warnock presents a ......
Tradition, Charisma, and Devotion in Renaissance Italy
Titian, one of the most successful painters of the Italian Renaissance, was credited by his contemporaries with painting a miracle-working image, the San Rocco Christ Carrying the Cross. Taking this unusual circumstance as a point of departure, Christopher J. Nygren revisits the scope and impact of Titian's life's work. Nygren shows ......
Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women's Academy
Decorative handcrafts are commonly associated with traditional femininity and unthreatening docility. However, the artists connected with interwar Vienna's female Secession created craft-based artworks that may be understood as sites of feminist resistance. In this book, historian Megan Brandow-Faller tells the story of how these artists ......
Recent political and social developments in the United States reveal a deep misunderstanding of race and religion. From the highest echelons of power to the most obscure corners of society, color and conviction are continually twisted, often deliberately for nefarious reasons, or misconstrued to stymie meaningful conversation. This timely ......
Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole shows that the Gothic style in architecture and the decorative arts and the tradition of medievalist research associated with Horace Walpole (17171797) and his circle cannot be understood independently of their own homoerotic culture. Centered around ......
