Georgia Barnhill, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts at the American Antiquarian Society, discusses the methods, meanings, and uses of various types of printed Civil War ephemera, and how they were used to document, memorialize and shape public opinion about the war on the home front. This talk took place on July 17, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.
Oct 30, 2015•48 min
Harold Holzer, chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and the author of numerous books on Lincoln and the Civil War, talks about the visual representations of the emancipation proclamation as well as the images of Abraham Lincoln as emancipator. This talk took place on July 19, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.
Oct 30, 2015•58 min
Joshua Brown, Executive Director of the American Social History Project and Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, discusses the pictorial journalism of the Civil War and the ways battlefront artists covered the conflict before photography could document warfare. This talk took place on July 11, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.
Oct 30, 2015•1 hr 21 min
Sarah Burns, the Ruth N. Halls Professor of the History of Art (emerita) at Indiana University, provides an in-depth analysis of Lilly Martin Spencer's "Home of the Red, White, and Blue." She places the painting within the broader visual context of women, veterans, and the flag during the U.S. Civil War. This talk took place on July 12, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.
Oct 30, 2015•39 min
Jeanie Attie, professor of history at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, provides a sweeping overview of the roles and images of women during the Civil War. She discusses northern and southern women and the ways the war shifted notions of domesticity and women's public space. This talk took place on July 17, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.
Oct 30, 2015•41 min
Joshua Brown, Executive Director of the American Social History Project and Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, presents a case study of interpreting a historical event through images. He examines images of the 1863 New York City draft riots from a range of pictorial newspapers in order to piece together the changing nature of the event as well as varying perspectives on the rioters' class and ethnicity. This talk took place on July 12, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the A...
Oct 30, 2015•42 min
Alice Fahs, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, presents a broad range of images that made up the visual landscape of the 1860s and explores how the Civil War did and did not transform the dominant images especially for African Americans and women. This talk took place on July 9, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.
Oct 30, 2015•1 hr 1 min
María Montoya, New York UniversityCity University of New York, April 25, 2014In this talk, Professor Montoya examines the history of the U.S.-Mexican border, and its role in shaping the national memory and identity of both countries. Notions of Mexican American citizenship and property rights are entwined with this history, and have shifted over time. To understand these transformations, Montoya chronicles the history, perception, and significance of the U.S.-Mexican border from 1848 to 1941 to ...
Apr 16, 2015•32 min
Isabel Martinez, John Jay CollegeCUNY Graduate Center, October 24, 2014In this presentation, Isabel Martinez places the recent experiences of unaccompanied minors migrating from Central America to the United States in a historical context, describing her family’s own youth migration story which begins in Mexico, 1902. She goes on to explore some of the reasons for the recent surge in Latin American youth migration, including increased poverty, violence, and economic instability associated with t...
Apr 14, 2015•44 min
Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, New York UniversityCUNY Graduate Center, October 24, 2014In this lecture, Professor Saldaña-Portillo addresses the multiple ways in which the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has affected the price of labor, increased narco-terrorism, and facilitated the transfer of drugs from Latin America to the United States, as well as the laundering of funds by drug traffickers in the United States and Mexico. She situates these processes within the parallel langu...
Apr 13, 2015•43 min
Lori Flores, State University of New York, StonybrookCUNY Graduate Center, April 25, 2014In this lecture Professor Flores traces the peaks and valleys of undocumented immigration, as well as the political and economic aspects of the influxes. She examines the U.S. Bracero labor program, the relationships between citizens, Bracero workers, and undocumented immigrants, and conflicts between moral laws and legal laws. Flores covers the impact of the Hart-Celler Act on Mexican legal and undocumented...
Apr 13, 2015•44 min
Ramona Hernandez, Dominican Studies Institute, City CollegeCUNY Graduate Center, February 7, 2014In this lecture, Professor Ramona Hernández closely examines both the statistics and the demographics of the increasing Dominican presence in the United States. Why is there a geographic shift in the locations that Dominicans are settling? How do Dominicans compare to other Latino groups in terms of assimilation into American society? Hernández overturns stereotypical perceptions that surround Domini...
Apr 13, 2015•52 min
Lisandro Pérez, John Jay CollegeCUNY Graduate Center, February 7, 2014In this lecture, Lisandro Pérez unpacks the long, distinct, and prolific history of Cuban Americans and their history’s close correlation with U.S. foreign and domestic policy. He uses census materials, forms, archives, city directories, naturalization records, vital records, newspapers, and magazines spanning over 200 years to reconstruct the Cuban community politically and socially in New York City, and explains the reasons ...
Apr 13, 2015•1 hr 11 min
Orlando Hernandez, Hostos Community ColllegeCUNY Graduate Center, December 6, 2013In this talk, Professor Hernández interprets texts from Puerto Rican educator and sociologist Eugenio María de Hostos as well as the Cuban poet and scholar José Martí. He describes the work of both writers as humanistic and cooperative, and situates both the writers and their work within the context of their influence on politics, history, and literature.
Jan 30, 2015•45 min
Andrés Reséndez, University of California – DavisCUNY Graduate Center, October 18, 2013In this talk, Professor Reséndez expands the traditional conception of America’s colonial past and paints a richer, more historically accurate picture of the Europeans who settled in the New World. The “Spanish Conquistadores” were not all Spanish, all male, and all funded by the king, but were actually cosmopolitan, international professionals, often funded by private entrepeneurs who came as settlers rather ...
Nov 18, 2014•33 min
CUNY Graduate Center October 18, 2013In this panel discussion, Pablo Mitchell, Professor of History, Oberlin College; Virginia Sánchez Korrol, Professor Emerita, Brooklyn College; and Andrés Reséndez, Professor of History, University of California, Davis deliberate on ways to incorporate Latino/a histories into Anglo American history, often portrayed as distinct narratives. The scholars discuss the tools they use in the classroom to expand students’ understanding of what it means to be American....
Oct 08, 2014•58 min
Karl Jacoby, Columbia UniversityCUNY Graduate CenterMay 7, 2013In this 35 minute talk, historian Karl Jacoby complicates the story of the history of North America by presenting the history of the Plains Indians through the perspective of multiple revolutions in the late eighteenth century: the expansion of the Spanish empire along the west coast and resistance by native peoples; the U.S. revolution that resulted in westward expansion; the formation of the Ohio Confederacy by Midwestern Indian tr...
Sep 09, 2013•37 min
Joshua Freeman, Murphy Institute for Labor Studies, City University of New YorkCUNY Graduate Center, March 7, 2013In this 45 minute talk, historian Josh Freeman describes how the New Deal expanded and fundamentally changed the role of government in American life, and why the Great Depression triggered such profound change when previous economic crises hadn’t. He also discusses the relationship between Labor and the New Deal, and how many New Deal programs excluded large numbers of female and non...
Apr 23, 2013•46 min
Peter H. Wood, Duke UniversityNewark MuseumJuly 12, 2012Peter Wood, emeritus professor of history at Duke University, discusses the career of Winslow Homer and his portrayals of African Americans during the Civil War. While many of Homer’s drawings and paintings appear nonpolitical, Wood argues that his training at Harper’s Weekly as a news illustrator prepared him for presenting current political debates in subtle ways. This fifty-minute talk took place on July 12, 2012 at the Newark Museum as ...
Mar 12, 2013•50 min
Cynthia Mills, The Smithsonian American Art MuseumCUNY Graduate CenterJuly 19, 2012In this forty-five minute talk, Cynthia Mills (1947-2014) the former executive editor of American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and co-editor of Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscape of Southern Memory traces the arc of Civil War commemorative public sculptures, describes the similarities and differences between Northern and Southern monuments, and discusses the continued interest...
Jan 14, 2013•45 min
Martha A. Sandweiss, Princeton UniversityCivil War @ 150: Is There Anything More to See?CUNY Graduate CenterNovember 3, 2011In this thirteen minute presentation, historian Martha Sandweiss challenges assumptions and some of the uses of Civil War photographs as historical documents. Although biased, unreliable, and unrepresentative, the images are mostly used as illustrations of events. While we remain fascinated with Civil War images, there is insufficient knowledge of how they were created and ...
Jan 04, 2013•13 min
Anthony Lee, Mount Holyoke CollegeCivil War @ 150: Is There Anything More to See?CUNY Graduate CenterNovember 3, 2011In this 15 minute talk, art historian, curator, and photographer Anthony Lee provocatively examines Civil War era photography by way of one case study. The discovery, in June 2010, of a supposedly rare carte-de-visite depicting two African-American boys began a contentious ordeal over the monetary and historic value of the artifact. Lee examines the process involved in the creatio...
Jan 03, 2013•17 min
Mary Niall Mitchell, University of New OrleansCivil War @ 150: Is There Anything More to See?CUNY Graduate CenterNovember 3, 2011In this seventeen minute talk, historian Mary Niall Mitchell uses less known and difficult to understand photographs to discuss the use of photography as propaganda during the Civil War. Abolitionists knew that they needed to “shrink the distance between the enslaved and the free” in order to reach their target audience, the white middle class. They harnessed an early ...
Jan 03, 2013•19 min
In this hour-long presentation, Anthony Lee, professor of art history at Mount Holyoke College, talks about the broad range and types of photographs taken during the American Civil War and ponders why some have received so much more attention than others. This talk was part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, a 2012 NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.
Oct 17, 2012•58 min
Ellen Noonan, American Social History ProjectInterviewed by Andrea Ades VásquezApril 16, 2012Created by George Gershwin and Du Bose Heyward and sung by generations of black performers, the opera Porgy and Bess has been both embraced and reviled in its long life. In this 22 minute interview, historian Ellen Noonan describes how the show played a role in African-American debates about cultural representation and racial uplift, and how staging and script changes in the current Broadway revival have...
May 15, 2012•22 min
Laura Lovett, University of MassachusettsHugh D. Hindman, Appalachia State UniversityKriste Lindenmeyer, Rutger’s UniversitySally Greenberg, National Consumers LeagueMarch 24, 2011To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in March 2011, the Gotham Center (Graduate Center, CUNY) sponsored Remembering the Triangle Fire. In this 55 minute podcast, Laura Lovett (University of Massachusetts) introduces the panel: Hugh D. Hindman (Appalachia State University, NC) (4:55), ...
Apr 04, 2012•55 min
Craig Steven Wilder, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyUFT Headquarters, Bronx, NYMay 24, 2011Craig Steven Wilder, professor of history at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaks to New York City teachers about the influence of school districting on the racial segregation of Brooklyn neighborhoods. Building on data from his book A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (2000) Professor Wilder describes the evolution of residential segregation as a direct result of the in...
Mar 28, 2012•36 min
Frank Deale, CUNY School of LawCUNY and Race Forum (Professional Staff Congress)New York City College of Technology, CUNYDecember 9, 2011Professor Frank Deale (CUNY School of Law) gave opening keynote remarks at the CUNY and Race Forum sponsored by the Professional Staff Congress. Providing social, political, and legal historical context for affirmative action, he broached two themes. First, the difference between anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies and second, voluntary affirmat...
Jan 27, 2012•17 min
Vincent DiGirolamo, Baruch College, CUNYCUNY Graduate CenterHistorian Vincent DiGirolamo discusses the historiography of early 20th-century immigration through Ellis Island. The Ellis Island paradigm he describes is the traditional immigrant narrative: push and pull factors lead poor Europeans to sail to the United States in search of better opportunities, they come through Ellis Island and over a generation or two, through a process of assimilation, they eventually “become American.” This is pr...
Jan 20, 2012•31 min
Deborah Willis, Tisch School of the Arts, New York UniversityCivil War @ 150: Is There Anything More to See?CUNY Graduate CenterNovember 3, 2011In this seventeen minute talk, Professor Willis discusses how as Civil War photographs were widely circulated, they became a story telling moment for those who posed. Looking at numerous images, she contemplates the “standard of pose” and what may have happened in front of the camera as well as the ways that these photos document the jobs, lives, aspirat...
Jan 04, 2012•18 min
