More than one hundred and fifty years after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still occupies a prominent place in the national collective memory. Paintings and photographs, plays and movies, novels, poetry, and songs portray the war as a battle over the future of slavery, often focusing on Lincoln’s determination to save the Union, or highlighting the brutality of brother fighting brother. Battles and battlefields occupy us, too: Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg all conjure up images of desolate landscapes strewn with war dead. Yet the frontlines were not the only landscapes of the war. Countless civilians saw their daily lives upended while the entire nation suffered. Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North reveals this side of the war as it happened, comprehensively examining the visual culture of the Northern home front. Through contributions from leading scholars from across the humanities, we discover how the war influenced household economies and the cotton economy; how the absence of young men from the home changed daily life; how war relief work linked home fronts and battle fronts; why Indians on the frontier were pushed out of the riven nation’s consciousness during the war years; and how wartime landscape paintings illuminated the nation’s past, present, and future. A companion volume to a collaborative exhibition organized by the Newberry Library and the Terra Foundation for American Art, Home Front is the first book to expose the visual culture of a world far removed from the horror of war yet intimately bound to it.

Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North

Arts & Photography

GREENE, DANIEL

Dillon, Diane

Burns, Sarah

Brownlee, Peter John

Stevens, Scott Manning

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Genre painting flourished in the U.S. during the mid-19th century. These narrative scenes depicting the everyday activities of stock or typed characters captivated American audiences. Delineating distinctly American characters, often through the exploration of racial, regional, or class differences, genre painting, like landscape, was often called upon as a vehicle for expression of cultural nationalism. Two paintings from the Louvre represent the Dutch and English schools, key sources on which genre painters in the U.S. drew in developing their own idiom. These rich genre paintings, alongside three outstanding American examples, enable the exploration of a variety of interrelated themes including the development of character types, confrontations between them, the spaces of their confrontations, the role of the senses as well as music and narrative, and the graphic reproduction and dissemination of genre paintings in the form of prints. Genre Painting and Everyday Life accompanies the first of a series of focused exhibitions collaboratively organized by the Musee du Louvre, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the High Museum of Art, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life

Marquand Books

When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1837 that "Our Age is Ocular," he offered a succinct assessment of antebellum America's cultural, commercial, and physiological preoccupation with sight. In the early nineteenth century, the American city's visual culture was manifest in pamphlets, newspapers, painting exhibitions, and spectacular entertainments; businesses promoted their wares to consumers on the move with broadsides, posters, and signboards; and advances in ophthalmological sciences linked the mechanics of vision to the physiological functions of the human body. Within this crowded visual field, sight circulated as a metaphor, as a physiological process, and as a commercial commodity. Out of the intersection of these various discourses and practices emerged an entirely new understanding of vision.
The Commerce of Vision integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Peter John Brownlee examines a wide selection of objects and practices that demonstrate the contemporary preoccupation with ocular culture and accurate vision: from the birth of ophthalmic surgery to the business of opticians, from the typography used by urban sign painters and job printers to the explosion of daguerreotypes and other visual forms, and from the novels of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to the genre paintings of Richard Caton Woodville and Francis Edmonds. In response to this expanding visual culture, antebellum Americans cultivated new perceptual practices, habits, and aptitudes. At the same time, however, new visual experiences became quickly integrated with the machinery of commodity production and highlighted the physical shortcomings of sight, as well as nascent ethical shortcomings of a surface-based culture. Through its theoretically acute and extensively researched analysis, The Commerce of Vision synthesizes the broad culturing of vision in antebellum America.

The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America (Early American Studies)

History

Americas

University of Pennsylvania Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brownlee, Peter John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Brownlee, Peter John