ONLINE IMAGES
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Picturing America, 1497-1899: Prints, Maps, and Drawings bearing on the New World Discoveries and on the Development of the Territory that is now the United StatesOver 1,000 original prints, drawings, and maps, selected primarily from The Phelps Stokes Collection, as well as from several other Library collections, featuring views of American towns and cities and representations of historical events, scenes, places, and battles relating to the United States, from 1497 to 1899. The selection of images is the same as that featured in Gloria Gilda Deák's 1988 book of the same title
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Charting North America: Maps from the Lawrence H. Slaughter Collection and OthersOver 1,000 maps of North America from the earliest printed portrayals to the close of the 19th century; multiple versions and editions allow for historical comparisons
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After Columbus: Four-hundred Years of Native American Portraiture369 prints and drawings by Simon van de Passe (1595-1647), George Catlin (1796-1872), and Karl Bodmer (1809-1893), dating from 1627 to the 1830s; 227 gelatin silver and platinum prints by photographers Edward S. Curtis (1868-1954), Karl E. Moon (1878-1948), and Frank A. Rinehart (1862-1928), and sculptor Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1958), from the late 1890s to 1927.
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DeBry's Grand VoyagesImages from the Library of Congress; early illustrations of the European first encounters with the "New World", from such a viewpoint
SELECTED IMAGE-HEAVY BOOKS
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American Indians in British Art, 1700-1840 by Call Number: ART N8217.I5 P73 2005ISBN: 080613657XPublication Date: 2005-12-01Ask anyone the world over to identify a figure in buckskins with a feather bonnet, and the answer will be “Indian.” Many works of art produced by non-Native artists have reflected such a limited viewpoint. InAmerican Indians in British Art, 1700–1840, Stephanie Pratt explores for the first time an artistic tradition that avoided simplification and that instead portrayed Native peoples in a surprisingly complex light.
During the eighteenth century, the British allied themselves with Indian tribes to counter the American colonial rebellion. In response, British artists produced a large volume of work focusing on American Indians. Although these works depicted their subjects as either noble or ignoble savages, they also represented Indians as active participants in contemporary society.
Pratt places artistic works in historical context and traces a movement away from abstraction, where Indians were symbols rather than actual people, to representational art, which portrayed Indians as actors on the colonial stage. But Pratt also argues that to view these images as mere illustrations of historical events or individuals would be reductive. As works of art they contain formal characteristics and ideological content that diminish their documentary value.
American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840, is richly illustrated with both color and black-and-white illustrations, some of them published here for the first time.
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An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660-1830 by Call Number: ART N8232 .E36 2003ISBN: 0719060052Publication Date: 2003-08-16The contributors to this volume analyze visual culture in the context of British and French Colonial activity in the North Atlantic from 1660-1830. It is a response to a noticeable omission in current art history and cultural studies, which have largely ignored the diverse and important body of visual imagery relating to colonialism, Atlantic slavery and the development of racial ideology. This fascinating collection demonstrates that the visualization of individuals, communities, social types, fictive characters, artefacts and landscapes, played a highly significant role in both the European representation and self-representation of the peoples and places of the Atlantic colonial world. Consequently, it reasserts the primacy of visual culture as an active participant in forming this complex and fluid "imagined community." -
Colonial Writing and the New World, 1583-1671: Allegories of Desire by Call Number: PS 367 S33 1999ISBN: 0521643058Publication Date: 1999-09-16Most scholars of Anglo-American colonial history have treated colonialism either as an exclusively American phenomenon or, conversely, as a European one. Colonial Writing and the New World 1583-1671 argues for a reading of the colonial period that attempts to render an account of both the European origins of colonial expansion and its specifically American consequences. The author offers an account of the simultaneous emergence of colonialism and nationalism during the early modern period, and of the role that English interactions with native populations played in attempts to articulate a coherent English identity. He draws on a wide variety of texts ranging from travel narratives and accounts of the colony in Virginia to sermons, conversion tracts and writings about the Algonquin language. -
Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization by Call Number: ART N8217.I5 G38 2008ISBN: 0816648476Publication Date: 2008-02-29In 1585, the British painter and explorer John White created images of Carolina Algonquian Indians. These images were collected and engraved in 1590 by the Flemish publisher and printmaker Theodor de Bry and were reproduced widely, establishing the visual prototype of North American Indians for European and Euro-American readers.
In this innovative analysis, Michael Gaudio explains how popular engravings of Native American Indians defined the nature of Western civilization by producing an image of its “savage other.” Going beyond the notion of the “savage” as an intellectual and ideological construct, Gaudio examines how the tools, materials, and techniques of copperplate engraving shaped Western responses to indigenous peoples. Engraving the Savagedemonstrates that the early visual critics of the engravings attempted-without complete success-to open a comfortable space between their own “civil” image-making practices and the “savage” practices of Native Americans-such as tattooing, bodily ornamentation, picture-writing, and idol worship. The real significance of these ethnographic engravings, he contends, lies in the traces they leave of a struggle to create meaning from the image of the American Indian.
The visual culture of engraving and what it shows, Gaudio reasons, is critical to grasping how America was first understood in the European imagination. His interpretations of de Bry’s engravings describe a deeply ambivalent pictorial space in betweencivil and savage-a space in which these two organizing concepts of Western culture are revealed in their making.
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Karl Bodmer's Studio Art: The Newberry Library Bodmer collection by Call Number: E78.W5 W8395 2002ISBN: 0252027566Publication Date: 2002-10-29To document the natural history and inhabitants of the American West, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied brought along Swiss artist Karl Bodmer on his 1833-34 expedition up the Missouri River. Bodmer's landscapes and portraits--later published as aquatints and woodcuts--are now considered the most vivid depiction of the nineteenth-century American West prior to the decimation of Plains tribes by disease. In paperback for the first time, this remarkable volume collects Bodmer's studio augmentations of the expeditionary sketches, and brings together nearly all of Bodmer's extant works not previously collected in book form. The book is framed by W. Raymond Wood's introduction and annotations of the artwork, Joseph C. Porter's examination of the expedition's scientific and intellectual significance, and David C. Hunt's historical summary of the publication of Bodmer's North American work. -
Native American Identities: From Stereotype to Archetype in Art and Literature by Call Number: E98.E85 V53 1998ISBN: 082631886XPublication Date: 1998-05-01Issues of identity and authenticity present perennial challenges to both Native Americans and critics of their art. Vickers examines the long history of dehumanizing depictions of Native Americans while discussing such purveyors of stereotypes as the Puritans, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Hollywood. These stereotypes abetted a national policy robbing Indians of their cultural identity. As a contrast to these, he examines the work of white authors and artists such as Helen Hunt Jackson, Oliver La Farge, the Taos Society of Artists, and Frank Waters, who created more archetypal fictional Indian characters.
In the second half of the book, Vickers explores the work of Indian artists and writers, such as Edgar Heap of Birds, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Linda Hogan, and Sherman Alexie who craft humanizing new images of authenticity and legitimacy, bridging the gap between stereotype and archetype. This is an essential book for all readers with an interest in the tragic history of Indian-white conflict.
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Native American Photography at the Smithsonian: The Shindler Catalogue by Call Number: E89 .S58 2003ISBN: 1588341216Publication Date: 2003-12-17This book of hauntingly beautiful Native American portraits reflects the tragic history of the Cheyenne, Sioux, Pawnee, Cherokee, and other groups whose leaders traveled to Washington in the mid-nineteenth-century to negotiate treaties with the US government. As compelling as the famous photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis, these unique images provide a close-up, unromanticized record of Native American life at a critical time in the history of relations between the US government and Native Americans, just after the Civil War and at the beginning of the great westward expansion of US territories. The images form the core of the Smithsonian's extensive collection of Native American photographs and of important collections in many other major museums around the world. Paula Fleming recounts the history of this collection, which was the Smithsonian's—and perhaps the country's—first photographic exhibit. A succint biography of A. Zeno Shindler, the photographer, is followed by a thoughtful examination of the key events surrounding the Indian delegations in Washington, providing for the first time a comprehensive picture of a poignant moment in history. -
New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery by Call Number: E121 .G7 1992ISBN: 0674618750Publication Date: 1992-09-01Describing an era of exploration during the Renaissance that went far beyond geographic bounds, this book shows how the evidence of the New World shook the foundations of the old, upsetting the authority of the ancient texts that had guided Europeans so far afield. What Grafton recounts is a war of ideas fought by mariners, scientists, publishers, and rulers over a period of 150 years. In colorful vignettes, published debates, and copious illustrations, we see these men and their contemporaries trying to make sense of their discoveries as they sometimes confirm, sometimes contest, and finally displace traditional notions of the world beyond Europe. -
Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America by Call Number: E77 .S573 2008ISBN: 0393062481Publication Date: 2007-11-17The colonial communities of eighteenth-century America were perhaps the most racially, ethnically, and religiously mixed societies on earth. Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics, and Covenentors, the Irish, the German, the French, the Welsh ”groups that rarely intermingled in Europe ”were thrown together when they confronted the American countryside. Rather than embracing the inescapable and ever-increasing diversity, the European settler communities had their very existence threatened by the tensions and fears among their own groups. Only through "Indian-hating" ”in both military and rhetorical forms ”could the splintered colonists find a common ground.In potent, graceful prose that sensitively unearths the social complexity and tangled history of colonial relations, Peter Silver gives us an astonishingly vivid picture of eighteenth-century America. He straddles cultural history, political history, social history, and ethnohistory to offer groundbreaking insights into the seminal forces that continue to shape the United States today. -
Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans by Call Number: E89 .P33 1992ISBN: 1565840410Publication Date: 1993-01-01 -
The Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 by Call Number: E199 .A59 2000ISBN: 0375406425Publication Date: 2000-02-15In this engrossing narrative of the great military conflagration of the mid-eighteenth century, Fred Anderson transports us into the maelstrom of international rivalries. With the Seven Years' War, Great Britain decisively eliminated French power north of the Caribbean — and in the process destroyed an American diplomatic system in which Native Americans had long played a central, balancing role — permanently changing the political and cultural landscape of North America. Anderson skillfully reveals the clash of inherited perceptions the war created when it gave thousands of American colonists their first experience of real Englishmen and introduced them to the British cultural and class system. We see colonists who assumed that they were partners in the empire encountering British officers who regarded them as subordinates and who treated them accordingly. This laid the groundwork in shared experience for a common view of the world, of the empire, and of the men who had once been their masters. Thus, Anderson shows, the war taught George Washington and other provincials profound emotional lessons, as well as giving them practical instruction in how to be soldiers. Depicting the subsequent British efforts to reform the empire and American resistance — the riots of the Stamp Act crisis and the nearly simultaneous pan-Indian insurrection called Pontiac's Rebellion — as postwar developments rather than as an anticipation of the national independence that no one knew lay ahead (or even desired), Anderson re-creates the perspectives through which contemporaries saw events unfold while they tried to preserve imperial relationships. Interweaving stories of kings and imperial officers with those of Indians, traders, and the diverse colonial peoples, Anderson brings alive a chapter of our history that was shaped as much by individual choices and actions as by social, economic, and political forces. -
The Discovery of North America by Call Number: E101 .C96 1972ISBN: 0070149054Publication Date: 1972-01-01 -
The New World: The First Pictures of America by Call Number: E141 .L88ISBN: 0903598493Prints of paintings by John White and Jacques Le Moyne and engravings by Theodore De Bry with contemporary narratives of the Huguenot Settlement in Florida (1562-1565) and the Virginia Colony (1585-1590)
