Introduction
1. Serene Jones, “Ferguson Decision Reveals the Brutality of Racism,” Time, November 25, 2014.
2. By assembly I am thinking of the framework created in Paul C. Taylor, Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016).
3. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin, 2019), 37.
4. The Caucasian racial category had come about from the work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who inaugurated the Caucasus as the homeland of whiteness in 1795. See Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and John Hunter, The Anthropological Treatise of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the Inaugural Dissertation of John Hunter, M.D. on the Varieties of Man (London: Anthropological Society, 1865). This tract located the Caucasus region more generally as the homeland of white racial purity for three reasons: skull symmetry, beauty, and antiquity-rooted heritage and biblical lore. Historians have maintained that Blumenbach borrowed the term “Caucasian” from his colleague and rival Christoph Meiners (1747–1810) without citing him. Blumenbach glossed the term “Caucasian” by referencing not Meiners, but a travel account by Jean Chardin. Meiners, who taught with Blumenbach at the University of Göttingen in 1776, had devised a two-category racial system comprised of the Tartars—the Caucasian and the Mongolian. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Variety of Mankind, quoting Chardin, Travels of Sir John Chardin, vol. 1, 171, in The Anthropological Treatise of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, ed. and trans. Thomas Bendyshe (London: Anthropological Society, 1865), 269. Among the foundational texts on the history of Blumenbach vis-à-vis the construction of racial whiteness are David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
5. As David Bindman notes, what we now term racial science is a nineteenth-century development that began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an investigation of what was termed “human variety.” Bindman, Ape to Apollo, 11–13. Toni Morrison offers a blunt assessment of the twinned nature of the interpenetration of the Enlightenment and scientific racism; see Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Maringer, 1998), 189.
6. The Caucasian War as one stage in the longer colonial conquest of the region has been studied extensively and is the constitutive foundation for understanding the Chechen conflict of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. See Thomas Barrett, “Southern Living (in Captivity): The Caucasus in Russian Popular Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 31, no. 4 (Spring 1998): 75–93; Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (London: Taylor & Francis, 2003); Moshe Gammer, “Nationalism and History: Rewriting the Chechen National Past,” in Secession, History and the Social Sciences, ed. Bruno Coppieters and Michel Huysseune (Brussels: VUB Brussels University Press, 2002), 117–140; Amjad Jaimoukha, The Circassians: A Handbook (New York: Routledge, 2001); Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: The North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002); Rebecca Gould, Writers & Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 26; Michael Kemper, “Khālidiyya Networks in Daghestan and the Question of Jihād,” Die Welt des Islams 42, no. 1 (2002): 41–71. See also Yo’av Karny, Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory (New York: Macmillan, 2000); Charles King, The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013); and Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2006). For a photographic reflection on the history of the Caucasian conflict, see Thomas Dworzak, Kavkaz (Amsterdam: Schilt, 2010).
7. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 7.
8. Beyond Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road, a few of the key texts on visuality and racial stereotype in the United States include Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016); Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation (London: Routledge, 1993); Richard Powell, Going There: Black Visual Satire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, 2020); Michelle Wallace, Dark Designs and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
9. Ivan S. Golovin, The Caucasus (London: Trubner & Co., 1854), 57, 74–75.
10. As I discuss in Chapter 1, the level of interest in Shamil is registered by the number of books that emerged about the leader, particularly during the height of the Crimean War.
11. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008), xi; Jersild, Orientalism and Empire, 12.
12. While the idea of the Caucasus is extensively documented in the context of the Russian Empire, commensurate examinations in the United States do not currently exist. Similarly, while the engagement with Shamil in the United States is an understudied topic, the literature on the reception of Shamil in the Russian-Soviet and European context is vast. See Jersild, Orientalism and Empire, esp. chapter 6. A few key texts include Aida Azouqa, The Circassians in the Imperial Discourse of Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoy (Amman: The Deanship, 2004); Thomas Barrett, “The Remaking of the Lion of the Dagestan: Shamil in Captivity,” Russian Review 53 (1994): 353–366; Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar; Gammer, “The Imam and the Lord: An Unpublished Letter from Shamil to the British Ambassador in Constantinople,” Israel Oriental Studies 13 (1993); Gammer, “Nationalism and History”; Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: The Sufi Response to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Leila Aboulela, The Kindness of Enemies (New York: Grove Press, 2015).
13. James McCune Smith, “Introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom (1855),” in Douglass in His Own Time: A Bibliographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates, ed. John Ernest (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 105–119.
14. Charles Mills, “White Ignorance,” in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 13–38; Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Also see Charles Mills, “Ideology,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (New York: Routledge, 2017), 100–111. Many scholars have shown how white racial formation was constructed as a category of social power and, as Cheryl Harris has shown, a form of property to be protected. A key aspect of the production of race was, as Richard Dyer and others have argued, to maintain whiteness as an unmarked category. See Dyer, White; George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly 47, no. 5 (1995): 369; Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–1791; Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–168, and “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism,” Borderlands 3, no. 2 (2004). The scholarship on the construction of whiteness is vast and discussed throughout this book, particularly in Chapter 1, and includes: Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Nicholas Mirzoeff, White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023). On the pitfalls of the presumed invisibility of whiteness, see Adrienne Brown, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); Eva Cherniavsky, Incorporations: Race, Nation, and the Body Politics of Capital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Hamilton Carroll, Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Robyn Wiegman, “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity,” boundary 2, no. 26.3 (Fall 1999): 115–150; and Claudia Rankine, “Brief Encounters with White Men,” New York Times Magazine, July 21, 2019, 38.
15. We see lurches toward this consolidation of the term “Caucasian” with language in the 1911 Dillingham Commission’s Report on Immigration, which invoked Blumenbach, endorsing his fivefold definition of race and compounding the use of Caucasian as a concept, not a visible, legible category. Jacobson notes that the Dictionary on Races and Peoples published by the Dillingham Commission stated that “Caucasian” would signify “all races, which, although dark in color or aberrant in other direction, are, when considered from all points of view, felt to be more like the whole race than like any of the other four races.” Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 2, 79. For more on the Dillingham Commission, see Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Katherine Benton-Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
16. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 135.
17. Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 3.
18. Haney López, White by Law, 5. The first case in which common knowledge was used as the foundation for the verdict was the 1878 In re Ah Yup federal district court case. It was not until 1909 that the courts were in conflict about whether racial science or common knowledge should prevail, with answers solidified in 1922 and 1923 with two Supreme Court cases, Takao Ozawa v. United States and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. Haney López, White by Law, 3–5.
19. The absurdity of the situation is particularly stark given that after 1870, naturalization was also available by petitioning the courts to be seen as black. See Haney López, White by Law, 2, 31–36.
20. Kaja Silverman’s landmark text The Subject of Semiotics introduces the idea of sutures as both a cinematic tactic and a conceptual approach that art and cultural historian Nicole Fleetwood takes up as a means of understanding the artistic process of digital assemblage—of making visible “gaps, erasures, and ellipses of dominant visual narratives and their underlying ideology of spectatorship” in the context of black aesthetics. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 6, 179.
21. As I discuss at length in Chapter 1, there is literature about this history, but mainly in Russian and oral traditions maintained in writing in the indigenous languages of the Caucasus—as well as in Turkish, Georgian, and more. Some of the most extensive accounts include Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide; and Nicolas Griffin, Caucasus: A Journey to the Land between Christianity and Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). For more on the formation of the diaspora fashioned from the migrancy of those in the northern Caucasus in Jordan, see Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, “Circassian Refugees and the Making of Amman, 1878–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49 (2017): 605–623; and Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024). The 2014 Sochi Olympics, held on a site integral to the study of Circassian genocide and exile, exposed how little this history is known by the public. See Amie Ferris-Rotman, “Russian Olympics Clouded by Nineteenth-Century Deaths,” Reuters, March 21, 2010; Thomas Grove, “Genocide Claims Complicate Russian Olympic Plans,” Reuters, October 13, 2011; “Georgia Plans ‘Circassian Genocide Memorial,’ ” Civil Georgia (Tbilisi), July 29, 2011; Maja Catic, “Circassians and the Politics of Genocide Recognition,” Europe-Asia Studies 67, no. 10, special section, “Family, Health, and Reproduction in Russia and Ukraine—in the Intersection between the Private and the Public” (December 2015): 1685–1708. While I include these references here, again, this book focuses on the limited extent to which this history was known in the United States.
22. Neal Ascherson, Black Sea (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). A methodological parallel: Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes that in Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution: 1789–1843, the Haitian Revolution never appears. See Michel-Trouillot, Silencing the Past, especially chapter 4.
23. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 6, 46.
24. W. J. T. Mitchell, Seeing through Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 13.
25. From the first use of the term “visuality” by Thomas Carlyle, who invented the word to mean a privileged perspective on history, the term has meant more than seeing; rather, a privileged regime of making meaning. Here I am thinking of Fred Moten on the “hegemony of the visual.” See Fred Moten, “Sound in Florescence: Cecil Taylor’s Floating Garden,” in Sound States, ed. Adalaide Morris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
26. Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., 3607; Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).
27. Foner, Second Founding, xx.
28. Here I’m thinking of, as one example, Jason Frank’s meditation on Douglass’s “political poetics.” See Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Early Revolutionary America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 211. While there is not room to discuss it further here, it is worth noting that Douglass’s idea of thought pictures has resonances with Kant’s formulation of the principles of mind, one being “the faculty of presenting aesthetic ideas” by which he meant the ability to, as Arthur Danto put it, use “experience” to “carry us beyond experience.” See Danto, What Art Is (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 123–124.
29. I have discussed this concept in Sarah Lewis, “Editor’s Note,” Vision & Justice (New York: Aperture, 2016), 11–14. Once a magazine issue, this has now been released as a book.
30. See John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed Man (New York: Liveright, 2015). All of Douglass’s speeches about pictures are reproduced in this volume, making it an invaluable publication, while of course they also remain in the holdings of the Library of Congress. Also see Frederick Douglass, “Pictures and Progress,” in John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 3: 1855–1863 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura: Representing the Antislave ‘Clothed and in Their Own Form,’ ” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (Autumn 2015): 31–60; Laura Wexler, “ ‘A More Perfect Likeness’: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation,” in Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, ed. Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 18–40; Ginger Hill, “ ‘Rightly Viewed’: Theorizations of Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lectures on Pictures,” in Pictures and Progress, 41–82; and Robin Kelsey, “Pictorialism as Theory,” in Picturing, ed. Rachael Z. DeLue (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art and University of Chicago Press, 2016), 186–204. I also have discussed these speeches by Douglass in Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) and Lewis, “Editor’s Note.”
31. Sean Ross Meehan, Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 154.
32. The listing of the purchase of photograph is in the Frederick Douglass Jr. account book from September 20, 1880, to October 4, 1884: on February 18, 1882, he purchased “photographs” for two hundred. This scrapbook is in the Walter O. Evans Collection. I was grateful to be able to see this years ago, prior to its acquisition by the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Also see Frederick Douglass’s last will and testament for his request to leave pictures and a portrait to his wife and daughter in Will Book, vol. 57, 178–179, Surrogate’s Court, Monroe County Courthouse, Rochester, NY.
33. Interview with Aleksandra Kvakhadze, September 2019, Tbilisi, Georgia.
34. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 11; Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 26–27, 73. The idea of the “un-visible” is in reference to Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), xv, as well as a framework used by Krista Thompson to discuss the politics of visibility within African diasporic practices. See Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 39–40; and Thompson, “A Sidelong Glance: The Practice of African Diaspora Art History in the United States,” Art Journal (Fall 2011): 19. For a discussion of the “aesthetics of opacity,” see Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, ed. Gerardo Mosquera and Jean Fisher (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004); and Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
35. Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House: 2020), 66.
1. Oliver Wardrop to Margrethe Wardrop, October 6, 1919, Oliver Wardrop Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford University. See also Oliver Wardrop, The Kingdom of Georgia: Notes of Travel in a Land of Women, Wine and Song (London: Sampson Low, Maston, Seale & Rivington, 1888), vii. The papers of Major General James G. Harbord indicate that he had received instructions in August to deliver his report “in person to the President.” See Frank McCoy, Chief of Staff, to James G. Harbord, August 13, 1919, box 8: Armenian Mission, 1919, James G. Harbord Papers, 1886–1938, Library of Congress. Wilson would suffer a stroke on October 2, 1919; it is not clear that he ever received Harbord’s report about the Caucasus women.
2. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). The first use of this term was in February 1918.
3. Manela, “ ‘Peoples of Many Races’: The World beyond Europe in the Wilsonian Imagination,” in Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson: The American Dilemma of Race and Democracy, ed. John Milton Cooper and Thomas Knock (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 184.
4. “The Armenian Spirit in Art,” Fine Arts Journal (September 1919); Antony Anderson, “Hovsep Pushman: An Appreciation,” The International Studio 61, no. 242 (April 1917).
5. Letter from Mrs. H. Pushman to Mr. Vikrey (1917), The President Woodrow Wilson House archives.
6. Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 60; Manela, “Peoples of Many Races,” 184–192.
7. Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 111.
8. In The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (hereafter PWW), ed. Arthur S. Link et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–1993), vol. 38, 539.
9. Wilson, A Nonpartisan Address in Cincinnati, in PWW, October 26, 1916, vol. 38, 539.
10. In fact, in one rare instance in July of 1918 when Wilson spoke out to denounce lynching, as we will see, he did so to underscore that such racial violence undermined the ability of the United States to project dominance in a global order. “A Statement to the American People, July 26, 1918 in PWW, vol. 49, 97–98; Manela, “Peoples of Many Races,” 202.
11. Many intertitles about the emergence of white supremacy were excised from Wilson’s own writing from volume 5 of A History of the American People, published in 1902. Michael Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” Representations 9 (1985): 150–195. The “Midnight” reference is from Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (New York: Mariner Books, 2022).
12. Oliver Wardrop to Margrethe Wardrop, October 6, 1919, 2–3.
13. His title as high commissioner is consistent throughout the archives of the British Museum, National Archives, and National Parliamentary Library of Georgia, though he is also referred to as chief commissioner.
14. Oliver Wardrop to Margrethe Wardrop, November 3, 1919, and November 7, 1919, Oliver Wardrop Papers. Marjory is often used in publications, Margrethe is the name listed in the official papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Wardrop, Kingdom of Georgia, vii.
15. Wardrop, Kingdom of Georgia, vii.
16. Oliver Wardrop to Margrethe Wardrop, October 6, 1919, 2.
17. Edward M. House diary, entries for January 3 and 4, 1917, in PWW, vol. 40, 408–409, white is capitalized in the original; William B. Wilson to Ray S. Baker, September 17, 1932, Ray Stannard Baker Papers, box 117, reel 84, Library of Congress. In this memo recalling events from World War I, white and yellow are lowercase; Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 67. The slippage between race and nation began with Immanuel Kant, who defined race as one category of “human variety” in his 1775 essay “On the Different Races of Mankind.” Often the word “nation” was used instead of race; see David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (London: Reaktion, 2002), 16; A. Scott Berg, Wilson (New York: Berkley Books, 2013).
18. Menand, Metaphysical Club, 67.
19. This term Redemption, which Gates emphasizes is not known to most, was introduced to him in a course when William S. McFeely assigned Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin, 2019), xiii.
20. This has meant more than that the production of race, as Richard Dyer and others have argued, would need to maintain whiteness as an unmarked category. Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation (London: Routledge, 1993).
21. This comparative work was inspired in part by Peter Kolchin’s comparative analysis of serfdom and slavery. See Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987). This book is deliberately not a foray into how the Caucasus region was received in Europe; there exists extensive research on the history and literature of the period from scholars including Moshe Gammer, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Charles King, Harsha Ram, and Walter Richmond. Beyond the works cited elsewhere in this chapter by Gammer, Gould, King, Ram, and Richmond, see Michael Kemper, “The Changing Images of Jihad Leaders: Shamil and Abd al-Qadir in Daghestani and Algerian Historical Writing,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 11, no. 2 (2007): 28–58; Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Harsha Ram, Prisoners of the Caucasus: Literary Myths and Media Representations of the Chechen Conflict (Berkeley: Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies, 1999).
22. Barnum American Museum playbill, September 24, 1864, Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. My research indicates that the first time the Circassian Beauty appeared on Barnum’s American Museum playbills was on September 24, 1864. Scholars have previously been vague about exactly when the first Circassian Beauty debuted on Barnum’s stage; Linda Frost dated it to “sometime in 1864.” See Linda Frost, “The Circassian Beauty and the Circassian Slave: Gender, Imperialism, and American Popular Entertainment,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 249. See also Irvin Cemil Schick, The Circassian Beauty (London: Verso, 1999).
23. Zalumma Agra is alternatively spelled Zulamma and Zalumma in the vast constellation of Eisenmann Circassian Beauties.
24. “Barnum & Bailey Show Pays Salt Lake Visit,” Salt Lake City Telegram, August 7, 1914, 7; “Amusements,” Daily Picayune, December 11, 1868; New York Herald, May 3, 1870, 8; “Amusements,” Daily Evening Bulletin, April 8, 1870, 3; “The Stage,” New Haven Evening Register, November 21, 1878, 4; “Fondling Snakes, Diamond Rattlers Are Said to Make Good Pets When Handled Properly,” Biloxi Daily Herald, February 19, 1902, 2.
25. One example of the use of hair in data collection of racial science is Louis Agassiz’s Thayer expedition to Brazil. See Louis Agassiz and Elizabeth Agassiz, A Journey in Brazil (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868); Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 136. Hair was also a signifier of the protean quality of race. When the Ohio Representative and former Union Army colonel William Mungen stated in his 1867 address on the House floor, “We cannot legislate upon hair. We cannot call the previous question upon complexions. We cannot divide the House upon the matter of high cheekbones … the absurdities and contradictions in which we should find ourselves,” he was not referring to just any racial group. He had begun by stating, “It is not the business of legislation to settle the comparative merits of races, and exalting the Circassian to put down the Mongol-Tartars.” See “Mungen the Ethnologist,” New York Tribune, July 13, 1867, 4. For commentary on this speech, see James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule in the South by 1877, vol. 6 (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 39.
26. The Daily Chronicle & Sentinel (Augusta, GA), March 12, 1857. Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Barnum’s America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3.
27. New York Herald-Tribune, June 6, 1865, 3.
28. Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017), 27.
29. Kevin Young, Bunk, esp. 4–44; James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
30. Kobena Mercer, “Black Hair / Style Politics,” Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), 11.
31. See Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
32. Gates, Stony the Road, 14.
33. “Disastrous Fire,” New York Times, July 14, 1865. In February 1865, Robert Kennedy was hanged for setting fire to the American Museum and a host of New York City hotels; see New York Tribune, November 26, 1864. See also James Trager, The New York Chronology (New York: HarperResource, 2003), 135; Nat Brandt, The Man Who Tried to Burn New York (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 239; “Destruction of Barnum’s Museum and Its Contents, Daily Intelligencer (Washington, DC), March 4, 1868, no. 17, 324, col D. The Liberator quoted the New York Tribune statement that “Barnum’s Museum was fired by incendiaries in a half a dozen places simultaneously”; see The Liberator, August 4, 1865. See also Jeff Rosenheim, Photography and the American Civil War (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 60–61.
34. Brandt, Man Who Tried to Burn New York, 14.
35. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) included a “Caucasus Race” scene, performed at the suggestion of a dodo bird, with no clear starting point and culminating with all receiving some sort of rank and prize. Jennifer Brody has read it as an unwitting metaphor for the unstable foundations within the term Caucasian. Jennifer Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 5.
36. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and John Hunter, The Anthropological Treatise of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the Inaugural Dissertation of John Hunter, M.D. on the Varieties of Man (London: Anthropological Society, 1865). See also Nell Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 47.
37. Allison Blakely, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1986), 5–12; Festus Eribo, In Search of Greatness: Russia’s Communications with Africa and the World (Westport, CT: Ablex, 2001), 1. “Batumi Negroes” is quoted in Eribo, In Search of Greatness, 274. Albert Parry, “Negroes in Russia,” Opportunity: The Journal of Negro Life 3, no. 34 (October 1925): 306–307.
38. Frith Maier, “Introduction,” in Vagabond Life: The Caucasus Journals of George Kennan, ed. Frith Maier (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 10.
39. It is not clear that this is the label Kennan gave the photograph.
40. Hughes had come to the region via Russia to take part in a failed film project, Black and White, a title that indicated the frame through which he came to see the southern Soviet republics themselves. Langston Hughes cited in Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 95, 130, 133. Also see Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 4, 167.
41. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 115.
42. Langston Hughes, Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Autobiography: I Wonder as I Wander, vol. 14 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 113.
43. Hughes, “South to Samarkand,” in Hughes, Collected Works, 137, 140–142.
44. Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People, vol. 8 (New York: Harper and Bros., 1918).
45. Alexandre Dumas, Adventures in Caucasia, trans. A. E. Murch, 1st American ed. (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1962), vii.
46. As Painter notes, the site claimed to be the “mountains of Ararat” are not considered to be the Caucasus region but in present day Turkey. Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 3–4. Also see “Founded by Noah,” Duluth News Tribune, August 11, 1912, 9.
47. Blumenbach’s gloss of the term Caucasian referred to a seventeenth-century travel account by Jean Chardin, who was unreserved in his praise of the beauty of the women in Circassia in particular. Chardin was a French jeweler at the court of Louis XIV who narrated his trip through the Caucasus, an uncommon route for a travel account in the seventeenth century. The well-received publication of Chardin’s travel account, which offered him great acclaim and entrance into the Royal Society in London, was one of the earliest documents that sent the idea of Caucasus women as supremely beautiful into circulation in the literary imaginary. See his Journal du Voyage du Chevalier Chardin en Perse & aux Indes Orientales, par la Mer Noire & par la Colchide (The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East Indies, 1673–1677) (1686). See also Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny; Nell Irvin Painter, History of White People; David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2018); and Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, 2012), vols. 1 and 2.
48. The term, used for more reasons than phenotype alone, points to a long-standing racial division between the Russians and the Caucasians. See Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 220.
49. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew S. Curran, eds., Who’s Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022), 40.
50. Blumenbach’s first edition of the text in 1775 followed Linnaeus’s four-fold scheme. By the second edition, however, he maintains that he had “more actively investigated the different nations of Eastern Asia and America, and, so to speak, looked at them more closely.” The result was the five-group system.
51. Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), citing the case of Takao Ozawa v. United States, 6.
52. Painter, History of White People, 52.
53. “A Museum Returned. Mr. Theodore Thomas Impress of London Concerts,” in Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, August 16, 1880, 2. See also the report about Zoe Meleke, shown in a dime museum in New Haven along with other curiosities. New Haven Evening Register, February 2, 1881, 4.
54. “A Museum Returned. Mr. Theodore Thomas Impress of London Concerts.”
55. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 82; Pierre Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1980), 14. Here I reference Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the idea via Trouillot, who argues that the unthinkable occurs not out of “ethical or political inclinations” but due to lack of conceptual frameworks, that is, due to “want of instruments of thought,” whether they be “concepts, methods, techniques.”
56. For more on the legacy of the gimmick after Barnum, see Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
57. Here I am thinking of the expansive sense of the wake, as deftly outlined by Christina Shape, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Interest in the Caucasian War precipitating scrutiny of the region is not obvious if we follow traditional historical accounts. Britain had a strong interest in an independent Circassia and Caucasus; it would mean Russia could not expand into the Ottoman Empire and India. The Crimean War was just one part of this much larger struggle over political control of the Caucasus region, a response to concerns about what became known as the “Eastern Question: the question about the long, slow withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire” as well as “the fear of Russian imperial expansion.” Stefanie Markovits, The Crimean War in the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 7.
58. “A Word about Museums,” The Nation, July 27, 1865.
59. Linda Frost, Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850–1877 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Young, Bunk.
60. See Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 204–242.
61. Barnum’s Zoe Meleke: Biographical Sketch of the Circassian Girl (1880), 3; Frost, “The Circassian Beauty and the Circassian Slave,” 252. See also “Biographical Outline of the Beautiful Circassian Girl, Zobeide Luti, or ‘Lady of Beauty,’ ” together with “A Brief Sketch of the Manners, Customs, and Inhabitants of Circassia” (New York: Barnum and Van Amburgh Museum and Menagerie Co., 1868), 3.
62. Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Rebecca Gould, Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).
63. Such narratives ranged from “The Fair Circassian” by Samuel Croxall (1759) to “The British Seraglio! Or the Fair Circassian,” by A. Moor (1819) to Isaac Robert Cruikshank’s “Persian Customs, Eunuchs Performing the Office of Lady’s Maids, Dedicated to the Circassian Beauty” (1819). Circassians were in shows such as “The Revolt of the Harem” in 1851 at the Bowery Theater and “The Capture of the Circassian in the Desert” at Quick’s Menagerie. See George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 6: 1850–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 80. The Bowery Theater was managed by June, Titus, Anvegvine & Co., and Quick’s Menagerie was managed by James M. June & Company. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). For more on photography and Orientalism, see Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan, eds., Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2013).
64. There were also attempts to distance the practice of white female slavery from associations with sub-Saharan slavery. Immanuel Kant would write of Circassian slaves a century earlier, “they seemed not to feel the tragedy of their condition;” see Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1764. Similar comments appeared in print during the Civil War; see “National Academy of Design,” Pittsfield Sun, April 25, 1861, 1.
65. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 19.
66. For an account of the connection between slavery in the Caucasus with the African slave trade, David Brion Davis assiduously details the historical connection between the white female slave trade associated with the Caucasus and the sub-Saharan African slave trade in Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
67. The full history of slavery in the Caucasus is understudied. There have been comparisons between US slavery and Russian serfdom. Few comparable accounts exist to consider the conceptual resonance and challenge that white slavery had during the period of slavery and Emancipation in the United States. Narratives such as that of Leila (Saz) Hanimefendi recount atrocities and the different conditions for African and Circassian slaves in imperial harems of the Ottomans, while Halide Edib Adivar and Huda Sha’rawi, among others, offer accounts of growing up in homes with enslaved Circassians among those from Sudan and Ethiopia—a frequent template in which to encounter images of Circassians in representation. Some histories, Eve Troutt Powell argues, focus on “the forced migration of people from the Caucasus that dominated headlines,” but largely in contexts outside the United States. See Eve Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987).
68. “Horrible Traffic in Circassian Women—Infanticide in Turkey,” New York Times, August 6, 1856, 6.
69. François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, “Letter XI—On Inoculation,” Letters on the English, 1909–14, available online at http://
70. See “Humors of the Day,” Harper’s Weekly 6, no. 16 (1860): 371–372; George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 6: 1850–1857, 80.
71. Kirsten Buick, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
72. See Martina Droth, “Mapping the Greek Slave,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016), http://
73. Charmaine A. Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Martina Droth and Michael Hatt, “The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers: A Transatlantic Object,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016), http://
74. Reverend Orville Dewey stated in a review that the statue was “clothed all over with sentiment, sheltered, protected by it from every profane eye.” Dewey, “Mr. Powers’ Statue,” Union Magazine of Literature and Art, October 1847. As Tanya Pohrt notes, this was an early review, as Dewey had seen the work in Florence; it was recycled by Powers, who had it published in many newspapers. See Pohrt, “The Greek Slave on Tour in America.” The tour agent, Minor K. Kellogg, a onetime friend of Powers, had traveled to Turkey and Georgia and had also created paintings of Circassians. For a review, see Christian Inquirer 1 (October 9, 1847): 20.
75. Freeman Henry Morris Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation (Washington, DC: Press of Murray Brothers, 1916), 3. Steven Nelson, “Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: Race, Representation, and the Beginnings of African American History of Art,” in Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002).
76. This version from 1866 is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. The manacle, Charmaine A. Nelson notes in the most extensive study of this work in the context of race and aesthetics, was a marker of the “symbolic transition” of the black body from “free to enslaved, human to commodity.” See Vivien Green Fryd, “Reflections on Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016), http://
77. Lisa Volpe, “Embodying the Octoroon: Abolitionist Performance at the London Crystal Palace, 1851,” in a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, ed. Martina Droth and Michael Hatt 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016): http://
78. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 66.
79. Douglass, “Lecture on Pictures,” Series: Speech, Article, and Book File—A, Frederick Douglass, Dated, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, 5; David Blight, Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 113–115.
80. Quoted in Volpe, “Embodying the Octoroon.” See also “The Great Exhibition,” Times (London), March 17, 1851.
81. The Georgian skull came from Blumenbach’s benefactor George Thomas, Baron von Asch, in St. Petersburg in 1793. His precise skull measurements, his norma verticals, were only part of what justified the skull’s prime place. He explained about the Circassian: “I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men.” The word “beautiful” appears five times on one page to describe the “Caucasian” skull; he claimed that Circassians were the loveliest group of all. It was beauty, he made clear, that strengthened his case. See Painter, History of White People, 82.
82. Jean Chardin, Journal du Voyage du Chevalier Chardin. See Blumenbach and Hunter, Anthropological Treatise.
83. Gates and Curran, Who’s Black and Why?
84. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 89.
85. “The Circassians,” The Miscellany (Trenton, NJ), July 15, 1805, 23. This article was published with slight variation for the Connecticut Mirror twenty years later in 1825, and again in 1827 in a Rhode Island newspaper. See “On Circassian Women,” Connecticut Mirror, October 3, 1825, 2; Providence Patriot & Columbian Phoenix, December 26, 1827, 1. The Connecticut Mirror states “that cannot be defined, but which exist, and necessarily constitutes beauty, since all men render it homage.” Also see advertisements in Farmer’s and Mechanic’s Almanac of 1875 (New York: John F. Henry, Curran & Co, 1875).
86. Charles King, “Imagining Circassia: David Urquhart and the Making of North Caucasus Nationalism,” Russian Review 66 (April 2007): 244.
87. Springfield Weekly Republican, August 10, 1867, 5; and Republican Farmer, August 7, 1849, 3. “Circassian Balm,” Dakota Republican (SD), January 11, 1868, 3.
88. Baltimore Patriot, November 23, 1829, 3; The Times, and Hartford Advertiser, April 27, 1824, 3.
89. Charles King, “Zalumma Agra, the ‘Star of the East,’ ” in Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present, ed. Stephen M. Norris and Willard Sunderland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 129–130.
90. “A Would-Be Circassian Beauty,” New York Times, December 17, 1884. Many newspaper accounts documented the afterlives of these Circassian Beauty performers. Examples include “Boston Dispatches,” Worcester Daily Spy, June 11, 1885, 1; “My Circassian Beauty: How I Became Acquainted with Her,” Kansas City Star, May 21, 1899, 10.
91. Ivan S. Golovin, The Caucasus (London: Trubner & Co., 1854), 107.
92. It was a version of “ ‘odic’ triumphalism,” as Harsha Ram terms it, consonant with the Russian ecclesiastical and secular tradition of panegyric oratory. See Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 11.
93. Lesley Blanch, Sabres of Paradise (New York: Viking, 1960), 11. The British had a substantial interest in Circassia’s resistance to Russia’s incursions into the Ottoman Empire. The creation of the current Circassian flag of twelve gold stars above three gold arrows on a green background was designed by a British diplomat, David Urquhart. It remains the official flag of the homeland of the Adyghe. As Oliver Bullough notes, a letter from “the people of Circassia” to Queen Victoria in April 1864 with expansive, spiraling copperplate script operated as a visual clue about the alliance between the two countries, the enormity of their suffering, and their unraveling stronghold on their homeland at the time of the Circassian Beauty’s debut on American stages. See Oliver Bullough, Let Our Fame Be Great: Journey among the Defiant Peoples of the Caucasus (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 102–103.
94. “Littell’s Living Age,” with an announcement for, “A Visit to Shamyl’s Country in 1870, by Edwin Ransom,” Lowell Daily Citizen and News, February 3, 1873, 2.
95. New York Herald, October 11, 1857, 2.
96. Barnum in James T. Cook, ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It in the Universe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 136. Barnum’s panegyric praise of the Circassian Beauties narrative also relates to oratory style found in the Russian tradition. Also see “Shamyl and the War in the Caucasus, Rendsberg,” The National Era, September 28, 1854.
97. Thomas Bollinger, interview with the author, September 30, 2010. See also Lesley Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise: Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus (London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2004), 52–53.
98. New Hampshire Sentinel, January 9, 1839, 3.
99. “Bloody Revenge of the Circassians,” Daily Delta (New Orleans), September 9, 1862, 2.
100. “The Circassians,” Boston Daily Advertiser, June 3, 1864, 1; “Foreign Summary,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), March 15, 1860, 3; “Circassian Exiles,” Dakota Weekly Union, August 16, 1864.
101. “From Constantinople,” New York Tribune, April 30, 1864, 9.
102. The Constitution (Middletown, CT), January 18, 1860, 2.
103. “From the National Gazette: Extract from Bishop Heber’s Travels in India,” Eastern Argus (Portland, ME), August 26, 1828, 1.
104. Kirill Rivkin, Arms and Armor of Caucasus (Edina, MN: Yamna Publishing, 2015); Stephen V. Grancsay, “A Gun from the Caucasus,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (September 1935): 173–174, figs. 1, 2.
105. For more on the internationalism that shaped Gardner’s photographic work during the Civil War, see Makeda Best, Elevate the Masses: Alexander Gardner, Photography, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020).
106. The photograph is dated circa 1861, but there are no extant accounts of Barnum’s Circassian Beauty appearing in New York before 1864. Brady was in New York in early 1864. In February, he photographed Lincoln in his Washington, DC studio, creating the image that would be engraved on the five-dollar bill. He returned to New York after April 1865, when he might have taken these photographs, including two images of Zalumma Agra’s Circassian companion, Zobeide Luti, who came to Barnum’s American Museum approximately a year after Agra debuted. Brady also delivered a lantern-slide lecture at Carnegie Hall in New York “consisting of lectures and reminiscence of the late War accompanied by views of photographs taken on the ground.” See Roy Meredith, Mr. Lincoln’s Camera Man: Mathew B. Brady (New York: Scribner’s, 1946), 263. Zureby Hannum arrived at Barnum’s American Museum in July 1865; see “The Circassian Family,” New York Daily Tribune, July 21, 1865, 3. I have used the spelling Zalumma because it appears most often in both primary texts and scholarship.
107. Mary Panzer, Mathew Brady and the Image of History (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 28; Home Journal, August 27, 1859, 1.
108. See Panzer, Mathew Brady, 1, 60–61.
109. The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, located in the Old Patent Office Building, is just one block from where Brady’s gallery in Washington once stood. Brady’s previous New York galleries were located at 205 Broadway, then at 359 Broadway (above Thompson’s Saloon), next at 643 Broadway, and finally at 785 Broadway. See “A Broadway Valhalla: Opening of Brady’s New Gallery,” American Journal of Photography and the Allied Arts & Sciences, n.s. 3, no. 10 (October 15, 1860): 151–153.
110. Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 40. The photographic studio and connected exhibition galleries were focal sites to both fashion and critique the truth during the antebellum period and the Civil War, and would be vital for sideshow performances. See Walter McDougall, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829–1877 (New York: Harper, 2008); Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
111. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1863): 11. Holmes said this in reference to images taken by Alexander Gardner on behalf of Brady; the images were shown at Brady’s gallery in 1862.
112. The War Department eventually acquired the negatives in 1875. See Panzer, Mathew Brady, 3, 13–14; Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” 3.
113. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 91.
114. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln might have won New York State’s vote, but he lost New York City by a margin of 30,000 votes. The draft riots of 1863 most violently exemplified the Civil War raging within the citizens of New York themselves. See Ernest McKay, The Civil War and New York (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 18.
115. McKay, Civil War, 158; Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 74.
116. “Brady’s Photographs,” New York Times, October 20, 1862, Mathew Brady Scrapbook, Brady / Handy Collection, Library of Congress.
117. The text that accompanied “A Burial Party” in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866) confirmed such scenes: “The residents of that part of Virginia … allowed even the remains of those they considered enemies, to decay unnoticed where they fell.” It echoed a battlefield report such as the one sent by Josiah Murphey of Nantucket, who stated that the deceased “remained where they had fallen for three days.” James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 544.
118. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008), 66.
119. Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 62–63.
120. Quoted in Joseph Allan Frank and George A. Reaves, Seeing The Elephant: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh (New York: Greenwood, 1989), 107.
121. Gettysburg veteran quoted in Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 57.
122. Boyd’s Washington and Georgetown Directory, Contains Also a Business Directory of Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria (Washington, DC: A. Boyd, 1864), 330.
123. For concerns about “discolorations” and “the worst mishap,” see Dr. G. H. Michel, “Discolorations,” The Casket 37 (December 1912): 23; Karen Pomeroy Flood, “Contemplating Corpses: The Dead Body in American Culture, 1870–1920,” PhD. diss., Harvard University, 2001. See also Robert W. Habenstein and William M. Lamers, History of American Funeral Directing (Milwaukee: Bulfin Printers, 1955), 330–334.
124. The Casket: A Journal Devoted to the Interests of Funeral Directors 31 (January 1906); Pomeroy Flood, “Contemplating Corpses,” 223.
125. Flag designer James McFadden Gaston to Jefferson Davis. Richmond Examiner, March 29, 1862; Raphael P. Thian, Illustrated Documentary History of the Flag and Seal of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1865 (Washington, DC, 1880), 39.
126. “The Flag of the Confederacy,” Charleston Mercury (SC), March 6, 1862.
127. The Confederacy debated alternatives to what we know as the Confederate flag. Staunch Secessionist newspaper offices from Charleston, South Carolina to Richmond, Virginia functioned as galleries for citizens to view the designs.
128. See Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 24, no. 615 (July 13, 1867), 268; Jules Prown, “Winslow Homer in His Art,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1, no. 1 (Spring 1987); Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting (London: Macmillan, 1983); Michael Ann Holly, “Vision and Revision in the History of Art,” in Theory between the Disciplines: Authority / Vision / Politics, ed. Martin Kreisworth and Mark A. Cheetham (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 151–168.
129. Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Civil War in American Art (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 226.
130. Among her many observations here, Harvey notes that wheat was a crop that symbolized freedom in the United States, as well as, I would add, the enslaved labor required to produce it. Harvey, Civil War in American Art, 226.
131. See Nicolai Cikovsky, “A Harvest of Death: The Veteran in a New Field,” in Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, ed. Marc Simpson (San Francisco: Bedford Arts for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1988), 82–101. See also Nancy Rash, “A Note on Winslow Homer’s ‘Veteran in a New Field’ and Union Victory,” American Art 9, no. 2 (1995): 88–93; Christopher Kent Wilson, “Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field: A Study of the Harvest Metaphor and Popular Culture,” American Art 17, no. 4 (1985): 2–27; Natalie Spassky, “Winslow Homer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s. 2 (Spring 1982): 8–9; John Wilmerding, “Winslow Homer’s Creative Process,” Antiques 108 (November 1975): 965–971; and John Wilmerding, Winslow Homer (New York: Praeger, 1972), 47, 9.
132. The double valence of a work such as Homer’s emerges as part of a widespread development. See Harvey, Civil War in American Art.
133. “The Circassians,” The Constitution (Middletown, CT), October 12, 1864, 1.
134. Barnum in Cook, Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 136.
135. North American (Philadelphia), November 1853, 1.
136. Mackie, Life of Schamyl, 56; “A Word about Museums,” The Nation, July 27, 1865; “The Seat of War,” St. Albans Messenger (VT), October 23, 1876, 2. Ivan Golovin and J. Milton Mackie in the 1850s described the region’s sublime beauty by invoking the river as a terrain-defining feature. See also Ivan S. Golovin, The Caucasus (London: Trubner & Co., 1854); Mackie book advertisement by John Jewett & Co. Advertisements, The National Era, January 24, 1856, 15; “Arrival of the Arabia. Three Days Later from Europe,” Daily Missouri Republican, November 23, 1853, 2; Daily Ohio Statesman, November 22, 1853, 2; The Barre Patriot (MA), November 25, 1853, 2.
137. Barnum in Cook, Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 136.
138. There is no mention of Circassians in Neal Ascherson, Black Sea (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
139. Ascherson, Black Sea, 132. Some Circassians today still refute this apocryphal explanation with the oft-quoted retort: “Ah, now I understand. I give thee that little bird, take it,” see Ascherson, Black Sea, 58.
140. Bullough, Let Our Fame, 9. Pioneering work by John F. Baddeley, Moshe Gammer, and Oliver Bullough, among others, has begun to reconstitute the history of the conflict in the Caucasus.
141. Sochi, location of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, is a site that Circassians claim was the last stand of the Caucasian War. A group of Circassian diaspora organizations petitioned the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to not hold the games at this politically charged site. The IOC did not respond. When a Circassian Congress led by Murat Berzegov gathered documents to prove the circumstances and wrote to Russia’s Duma for acknowledgment of the genocide, the Duma replied that the Circassians “do not appear on the list of … ethnic groups [that] underwent partial repression.” See Bullough, Let Our Fame, 137. Just as the Armenian genocide was long denied but eventually recognized, the focus on Sochi prompted the Georgian parliament in May 2011 to recognize as genocide the forced emigration and massacre of Circassians by tsarist Russia. Weeks later, the Georgian government resolved to open a Caucasus memorial in 2012 in the village of Anaklia on the Black Sea coast. As a result, a nascent Circassian independence movement has taken hold. (Thus far, Russian officials have met with Circassian leaders, but have resisted all requests for acknowledgment of past crimes). See “Circassians genocie [sic] overshadows Sochi bid,” Reuters, October 13, 2011; “Georgia Plans ‘Circassian Genocide Memorial,” Civil Georgia (Tbilisi), July 29, 2011.
142. Bullough, Let Our Fame, 108. See also W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields: A History of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).
143. A more direct translation of this title suggests that it could be more accurately described as “Abandonment of the aul by the mountaineers as Russian troops approach.”
144. Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020).
145. “The Last of the Circassians,” Deseret News, July 6, 1864, 319.
146. George Leighton Ditson, Circassia; or, A Tour to the Caucasus (New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1850), 275.
147. “The Circassians,” True Flag (Boston), December 3, 1859.
148. Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 112. Thomas M. Barrett argues that American newspapers emphasized the “frontier process” dynamic in the Caucasus. Given the economic dependency of the Russian Cossacks on the region as well as the practice of nativization, the Russian Cossacks, he argued, functioned also as “settlers” in the Caucasus’s native region. Thomas M. Barrett, “The Remaking of the Lion of the Dagestan: Shamil in Captivity,” Russian Review 53, no. 3 (1994): 353–366.
149. Assimilation was bi-directional on this “frontier.” There was a permeable line between the Caucasians led by Shamil and the Cossacks that made them defy the quarantine measures to facilitate the trade that the Russians, new to the region, desperately needed. Cossacks adopted the Caucasian lifestyle and practical systems despite being hired to attack Caucasians on imperial Russia’s behalf.
150. Bullough, Let Our Fame, 108. Also See W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields: A History of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).
151. Sandwith to Gratz in The Spectator (quoted in The Manchester Guardian, August 2, 1862, 6).
152. K. H. Karpat, “Ottoman Immigration Politics and Settlement in Palestine,” in Settler Regimes in Africa and the Arab World: The Illusion of Endurance (Wilmette, IL: Medina University Press International, 1974), 57–72.
153. Henri Troyat, Pushkin, trans. Nancy Amphoux (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 361.
154. Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917 (Montreal: Queen’s University Press, 2003), 12; Main Staff of Caucasus Army, 1864, GVIARF (Russian Historical Society), f. 400, op. 1, 1864, d. 4736, Delo “Otchet po glavnomu shtabu o voennykh desitviiakh voisk Kavkazskoi armii,” Emigration of natives of Kuban oblast to Turkey, l.61.
155. “Circassia Is Blotted from the Map,” New Haven Daily Palladium, June 2, 1864, col. C.
156. “The Circassians,” Boston Daily Advertiser, June 3, 1864, 1.
157. “The Circassian Exodus: Great Sufferings of the Circassians,” Farmer’s Cabinet, March 14, 1860, 1.
158. “The Circassian—Suffering and Death,” Albany Journal, November 23, 1864, 2; Bullough, Let Our Fame, 103–111.
159. “The Rebel Forces—Lee and Johnston vs. Grant and Sherman, and the Mountain Region of East Tennessee,” New York Herald, March 19, 1865.
160. E. B. Long and Barbara Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 (New York: Doubleday, 1971).
161. “The War in the South-West Important from Tennessee. Columbus Not Evacuated. Gov. Harris Determined to Fight,” New York Daily Herald, February 26, 1862, 8.
162. “Not Always,” Milwaukee Sentinel (published as Milwaukee Daily Sentinel), March 8, 1865, 2. Here the term “fastnesses” references the nineteenth-century term for stronghold.
163. “Treason in Russia,” New Orleans Times, June 26, 1865, 8. Other newspapers reported on the conflict in Circassia, including Boston Daily Advertiser, January 17, 1860, 1; “Latest News by Telegraph Arrival of the Teutonia,” The Constitution, January 27, 1860, 3; New York Tribune, January 27, 1860, 2; “By Telegraph for the Baltimore Sun,” The Sun, January 27, 1860, 2; “Latest News from Europe,” Daily State Gazette and Republican, January 28, 1860, 2; “Additional and Later from Europe,” Daily Evening Bulletin, February 20, 1860, 2.
164. “The Last of the Circassians,” Deseret News, July 6, 1864, 319; Ursus Ferox, “One of the Blackest Pages in European History. Russian Ideas of Civilization,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, April 30, 1877, 2.
165. The Caucasian War was often considered a “Circassian struggle” in the nineteenth century, so much so that the New York Herald noted that it should be called a “Caucasian” struggle instead. See “Our St. Petersburg Correspondence: … An Ethnological Correction—The Caucassians [sic] Not Circassians, &c.,” New York Herald, October 11, 1857, 2. Circassians (or “Cherkes”) were part of the Adyghe group of the northwest Caucasus. This was not a “Circassian War,” as it was often misnamed in the nineteenth century. In fact, the leader of the resistance in the Caucasus was the imam of the western-neighboring regions of Daghestan and Chechnya, though he also led the Circassians. Yet the pure valence of the term Circassian accorded by racial science turned it into a catchphrase for the people from the region as a whole. See Bullough, Let Our Fame.
166. See Liubov Kurtynova-D’Herlugnan, The Tsar’s Abolitionists: The Slave Trade in the Caucasus and Its Suppression (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
167. “The Caucasus: Mr. George Kennan’s Lecture on This Interesting Land,” Seattle Times, February 19, 1893.
168. Jersild, Orientalism and Empire, 110. See Moshe Gammer, “Shamil and the Murid Movement, 1830–1859: An Attempt at a Comprehensive Bibliography,” Central Asian Survey 10, nos. 1 and 2 (1991): 189–247. Indeed, even a Google n-gram search shows the increasing frequency of books about the figure published in English. See Barrett, “Remaking of the Lion,” 366. Books on Shamil include G. Bernier, Les hôtes de Chamil (Paris, 1854); N.a., Ein Besuch bei Schamyl—Brief eins Preussen (Berlin, 1855); Friedrich Martin von Bodenstedt, Die Völker des Kaukasus und ihre freiheitskampfe gegen die Russen (Berlin, 1855); Guillaume Depping, Schamyl, le prophète du Caucase (Paris, 1854); Golovin, Caucasus; August von Haxthausen, The Tribes of the Caucasus. With an Account of Schamyl and the Murids, trans. J. E. Taylor (London, 1855); Kenneth Mackenzie, Shamil and Circassia (London, 1854); John Mackie, Life of Schamyl; and Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence against Russia (Boston, 1856); Alexander Marlinsky (Bestoujev), Esquisses Circassiannes—Esquisses sur le Caucase (Paris, 1854); Xavier Marmier, Du Danube au Caucase. Voyages et littérature (Paris, 1854); John P. Morrel, Russia and England: Their Strength and Weakness (New York, 1854); Louis Moser, The Caucasus and Its People (London, 1856); Ludwig Moser, Der Kaukasus, seine Volkerschaften, deren Kampfe etc., nebst einer Charakteristik Schamils (Vienna, 1854); Laurence Oliphant, The Russian Shores of the Black Sea (New York, 1854); Oliphant, The Trans-Caucasian Campaign of the Turkish Army under Omer Pasha (Edinburgh, 1856); Thomas Peckett Prest, Schamyl; or, The Wild Woman of Circassia. An Original Historical Romance (London, 1856); N.a., Shiamyl e la Guerra santa nell’Oriente del caucaso (Milan, 1854); E. Spencer, Turkey, Russia, Black Sea and Circassia (London, 1854); René Gaspard Ernest Taillandier, Allemagne et Russie; Études historiques et litteraires (Paris, 1856); Edmond Texier, Schamyl (Paris, 1854); Horace Vernet, Lettres intimes de M. Horace Vernet pendant son voyage en Russie, 1842–1843 (Paris, 1854); Vernet, Schamyl als Feldherr, Sultan und Prophet des Kaukasus, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1854); Friedrich Wagner, Schamyl and Circassia, ed. Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie (London, 1854); Vernet, Sciamul, il profeta del Caucaso (Florence, 1855); Frederick Wagner and F. Bodenstedt, Shamil, the Sultan Warrior and Prophet of the Caucasus, trans. Lascelles Wraxall (London, 1854); Maurice Wagner, Travels in Persia, Georgia and Kurdistan (London, 1855).
169. Leila Aboulela, The Kindness of Enemies: A Novel (New York: Grove, 2017).
170. Wilson, History of the American People, vol. 8.
171. Wilson, History of the American People, vol. 8, 249–250. See also The Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia, ed. F. B. Sanborn (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1885).
172. The play’s American debut was in Boston. Schamyl debuted on November 20, 1854, at the National Theater, ran for a week billed as Schamyl, The Hero of Circassia, and starred an actor named Wm. Fleming. The New York debut was at the Metropolitan Theater on December 11, 1854. See Joseph N. Ireland, Records of the New York Stage from 1750 to 1860, vol. 2 (New York: T. H. Morrell, 1866), 746; George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 7: 1857–1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 233; “James R. Anderson,” in T. Allston Brown, History of the American Stage: Containing Biographical Sketches of Nearly Every Member of the Profession That Has Appeared on the American Stage, from 1733–1870 (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1870); Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak, The Oxford Companion to the American Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 201; Allan Stuart Jackson, The Standard Theater of Victorian England (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1993), 102.
173. Jackson, Standard Theater of Victorian England, 101–102. Adapted from a French play by Anderson and William Markwell, the production was a “sensation drama” based on reporting about Shamil in US newspapers.
174. “All Sorts of Items,” Daily Evening Bulletin, March 13, 1859, 1. It is likely that the “son of Schamyl” in the Bulletin was a professional or amateur impersonator. Shamil and his sons were captured in Gunib in late 1859 and never came to America.
175. Walt Whitman, “The Old Bowery: A Reminiscence of New York Plays and Acting Fifty Years Ago,” The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman, vol. 3, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke et al. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), 190. Later, on February 28, 1876, “Schamyl” would appear on American stages again in a play by Kate Fisher called Schamyl; or, The Black Horse of the Caucasus, put on at Wood’s Museum and Menagerie in New York.
176. Bullough, Let Our Fame, 298.
177. In a letter about his visit in January 1864, on a tour in Europe, Aldridge describes the defeated hero as if a living tableau: “There is a decidedly benevolent expression in Schamyl’s countenance, so much so indeed, that he looks more like a placid Patriarch of old than a famous mountain warrior. He is considerably above middle height; I should say full six feet when standing erect. He wore on his head a large white turban, with a small red crown and tassel, and just below it an encircling band of beautiful black lambskin.” Bernth Lindfors, Ira Aldridge: The Last Years, 1855–1867 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 201.
178. See “Our St. Petersburg Correspondence: … An Ethnological Correction—The Caucassians [sic] Not Circassians, &c.,” New York Herald, October 11, 1857, col. E, 2.
179. King, “Imagining Circassia,” 243; “Circassia and the Circassians,” Penny Magazine, April 14, 1838. Rebecca Ruth Gould is among the many scholars who write powerfully about how this combat of the Caucasian conflict lingered well into the twentieth century. See Gould, Writers and Rebels; “The Rebellion in Turkey: Speculations and Spasms of the Stock Exchange,” New York Herald, September 20, 1875, 3.
180. “Revolt of the Mahamedans,” Daily Critic, May 14, 1877, 7; “By Telegraph. Troops for Salt Lake. The Russians Crossing the Danube. The Mahamedan Insurrection,” Daily Critic, May 15, 1877, 1.
181. Golovin, Caucasus, 30.
182. T. H. Huxley, “Schamyl, The Prophet-Warrior of the Caucasus,” Westminster Review 61, n.s. 5 (1854): 480–519.
183. Dumas, Adventures in Caucasia, 62.
184. “Schamyl,” Fayetteville Observer, September 25, 1854, col. A. The term “Circassian hair” also referred to a man’s head of frizzy hair. See “Ruined His Business,” Grand Forks Daily Herald (ND), September 4, 1891, 7. See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (London: Routledge, 1995); Timothy Barringer, “Images of Otherness and the Visual Product of Difference,” in The Victorians and Race, ed. Shearer West (Aldershot, UK: Scholar’s Press, 1995).
185. John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (New York: Longmans, Green, 1908), 249.
186. “Russian Ideas of Civilization: One of the Blackest Pages in European History,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, April 30, 1877, 2; “War in Asia: A Russian Military Expedition to Acquire Strategical Positions,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 12, 1877, 1; “The First Two Weeks of War: The First Shot of War Was Fired in Asia,” Jackson Citizen (MS), May 15, 1877, 8.
187. Bullough, Let Our Fame, 307. The clicking sound in fact appears in Leo Tolstoy’s Prisoner of the Caucasus (1870), where he describes the Caucasus men who captured the Russian hero as uncivilized through the same description: one Caucasus mountaineer, Abdul, spoke through a series of tongue clicks, which unnerved the protagonist Zhilin.
188. “Circassian Atrocities,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), July 28, 1876, 2; Bruce Grant, “The Good Russian Prisoner: Naturalizing Violence in the Caucasus Mountains,” Cultural Anthropology 20 (2005): 39–67.
189. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 42.
190. “Circassian Soldiers Not so Bad as They Have Been Represented,” Territorial Enterprise (Virginia City, NV), August 22, 1876.
191. See “Circassian Soldiers Not so Bad”; also “The Circassian Brigade,” Trenton State Gazette, July 20, 1877.
192. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). See also Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 6.
193. In archaeology and oceanography, sounding is a method meant to reveal what has been buried. Soundings from the Atlantic, the title of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s mid-nineteenth–century treatise on the image at the start of the photographic age, reminds us that a sounding is not simply a turn of phrase.
194. Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 7. Also see Michael Gaudio, Sound, Image, Silence: Art and the Aural Imagination in the Atlantic World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
1. Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 90.
2. Frederick Douglass, “Pictures and Progress,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ed. John W. Blassingame (hereafter FDP) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), ser. 1, vol. 3, 461. Douglass delivered another version of this speech at Wieting Hall in Syracuse, New York, on November 15, 1861. For the full transcript of these speeches, see John Stauffer, Celeste-Marie Bernier, and Zoe Trodd, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York: Norton, 2015). Also see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University Press of Chicago Journals, Critical Inquiry series, 1992); Laura Wexler, “ ‘A More Perfect Likeness’: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation,” in Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, ed. Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 18–40; and Ginger Hill, “ ‘Rightly Viewed’: Theorizations of Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lectures on Pictures,” in Pictures and Progress, 41–82. I have discussed Frederick Douglass’s speeches in Lewis, Rise.
3. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
4. Douglass, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” in The Portable Frederick Douglass, ed. John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2016), 231.
5. Wilson writes to his wife that he would like to buy it on August 13, 1902. See Wilson to Ellen Axson, August 13, 1902, PWW, vol. 14, 79.
6. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 81.
7. Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6, 45, 73, 107, 133.
8. Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 20.
9. “Artist Conversation: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Professor Sarah Lewis, and Sir Isaac Julien,” Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, May 19, 2023, https://
10. Both Douglass and Jacques Rancière are interested in the constructive qualities of aesthetics, of images, and their potential for rupturing the logic of political rules governing social life. “Images change our gaze and the landscape of the possible,” Rancière concludes, if they are not used for instrumental purposes, as propaganda. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009), 13, 105.
11. Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: Norton, 1996); Darcy Grigsby, Enduring Truths: Sojourner Truth, Shadow and Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Rancière saw the relation of art and politics in the dramatically different context of the 1990s and has focused almost exclusively on aesthetics over the past few decades. See, for example, Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (New York: Continuum, 2004).
12. A short history of the idea of picturing moves from perspective—resolving an image to approximate natural sight in the land—to picturing a figure. But the boundaries of the category itself, as Robin Kelsey notes, are “neither as obvious nor as firm as they may seem.” Picturing, inextricably conditioned by race in the United States, was not merely about scrutinizing the individual body, but became an operation of assessing global narratives to support ideas of racial hierarchy. Robin Kelsey, “Pictorialism as Theory,” in Picturing, ed. Rachael Z. DeLue (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2016), 176–211.
13. James McCune Smith, “Introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom (1855),” in Douglass in His Own Time: A Bibliographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates, ed. John Ernest (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 105–119; 134.
14. As Mirzoeff writes, “the ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer.” See Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.
15. The scholarship on this history is vast, and includes Aston Gonzalez, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Matthew Fox-Amato, Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Deborah Willis, The Black Civil War Solider: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York: New York University Press, 2021).
16. Kaja Silverman as read through Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
17. James McCune Smith, “Introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).”
18. Eisenmann’s studio, opened in 1879 at 229 Bowery, is shown in “New York City, Insurance Maps, Rivington St. to East 22nd Street, 1868,” in Insurance Maps of the City of New York, vol. 2 (New York: Perris & Browne, 1868). Mark Caldwell, New York Night: Its Mystique and Mystery (New York: Scribner’s, 2005), 127.
19. Similarly, performance scholar Tavia Nyong’o considers the hardness of antebellum black ceramic figurines of kitsch memorabilia as a suggestion of “blackness as a hardened form of subjectivity.” See Tavia Nyong’o, “Racial Kitsch and Black Performance,” Yale Journal of Criticism 15 (2002): 377.
20. Christopher R. Smit, “A Collaborative Aesthetic: Levinas’s Idea of Responsibility and the Photographs of Charles Eisenmann and the Late Nineteenth-Century Freak-Performer,” in Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, ed. Marlene Tromp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 294. Connected to this idea is that of the performance of surrogation—as defined by Joseph Roach, a process of cultural reproduction in which individuals perform “who they thought they were not” to arrive at clarified self-definition. See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3.
21. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University, 2011); Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 101, no. 4 (2009): 67–94.
22. “Freaks: Their Salaries and Their Jealousies,” Telegraph and Messenger (Macon, GA), November 11, 1883, 8.
23. See Jean François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). My profound gratitude to my friend and colleague Huey Copeland for an exchange about this concept and so many others in this manuscript.
24. Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2017).
25. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly 3 (June 1859).
26. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 13; John Tagg, “The Currency of the Photograph,” in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin (London 1982), 110–141; Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” in Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 96–101; Deborah Willis, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York: New York University Press, 2021).
27. Smit, “Collaborative Aesthetic,” 293.
28. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” Atlantic Monthly 12 (July 1863): 15; Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A. A. E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 3.
29. Douglass, “Pictures and Progress,” FDP, vol. 3, 454.
30. My thanks to Laura Wexler for her lecture about these attempts to photograph the moon in the nineteenth century in April 2012.
31. Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 12.
32. See “White and Colored Slaves,” Harper’s Weekly, January 30, 1864, 71; Mary Niall Mitchell, “ ‘Rosebloom and Pure White,’ or so It Seemed,” American Quarterly 54, no. 3 (September 2002): 398. See also Laura Wexler, “Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye,” in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
33. American Missionary (March 1860): 68–69.
34. Mitchell, “ ‘Rosebloom and Pure White,’ ” 378, 397–398.
35. Frederick Douglass, “White Slaves Recover Their Freedom,” FDP, September 21, 1855.
36. Michael Mitchell, Monsters of the Gilded Age: The Photographs of Chas. Eisenmann (New York: ECW Press, 2002), 11.
37. “The Circassian Girl’s Despair,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (OH), January 24, 1884, 1.
38. Caldwell, New York Night, 139.
39. Armond Fields and L. Marc Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway: Lew Fields and the Roots of American Popular Theater (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 55.
40. Fields and Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway, 21.
41. Rachel Adams, Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
42. Fields and Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway, 7.
43. Marlene Tromp with Karyn Valerius, “Introduction: Toward Situating the Victorian Freak,” in Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, ed. Marlene Tromp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 7.
44. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 109–110.
45. Mitchell, Monsters of the Gilded Age, 33. “Circassian Girl’s Despair,” 1; Smit, “Collaborative Aesthetic,” 293.
46. “Circassian Girl’s Despair,” 1.
47. The ordinariness of the cartes that pervaded people’s homes moved “the burden of imaginative thought from the artist to the viewer.” See Geoffrey Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,” in Photography: Theoretical Snapshots (London: Routledge, 2009), 94.
48. Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life,” 91.
49. Quoted in McCauley, “Introduction,” in A. A. E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph, 2. See also Émile Zola: Oeuvres Completes, ed. Maurice Le Blond, vol. 6: La Curée (Paris, 1927), 124–125.
50. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 11.
51. “The Circus in the Rain: How Barnum’s Ethnological Congress Spends Sunday,” Springfield Daily Republican (MA), June 1, 1885, 5.
52. In much the same way that the tightly regulated system of anthropometry “transforms space” behind the camera into an “instrument” of racial measurement through graphs and measurements, the Circassian Beauty was offered up as an object of racial inspection, but was measured by the eyes of the audience. Instead of using the skull, J. H. Lamprey and T. H. Huxley took the profile and frontal head views as the new standard of the racial classification practice beginning in the 1860s. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
53. Strother outlines the many lawsuits brought by abolitionist groups led by Zachary Macaulay who read the body language, gestures, and disposition of Sara Baartman—featured in a nineteenth-century freak show under the name Hottentot Venus—as a sign not of her character, but of the inappropriateness of the display. See Z. S. Strother, “Display of the Body Hottentot,” in Africans on Stage, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 27, 31. The italics on page 27 (i.e. “how to interpret what they see”) and “… did not speak for itself” are both in Strother’s scholarship.
54. Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1892]), 229; Gabrielle Foreman, “Reading Aright: White Slavery, Black Referents, and the Strategy of Histotextuality in Iola Leroy,” Yale Journal of Criticism 10, no. 2 (1997): 327–354.
55. Leja, Looking Askance, 15. Also see Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
56. Leja, Looking Askance, 12.
57. Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
58. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Boston: Lily and Wait, 1832), 75.
59. Charles D. Martin, The White African American Body: A Cultural and Literary Exploration (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 22–33.
60. Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (New York: Penguin, 2016); Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Nell Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
61. New York Times, December 15, 1859, 4. Also see Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). The Octoroon, which opened as an “immediate success” on December 6, 1859, at the Winter Garden Theater and in 1860 at both the New Bowery Theater and the Old Bowery Theater, could have added another semiotic charge to Eisenmann’s comparative set of images.
62. See “Theater Going,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia), May 21, 1870.
63. Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon (reprint; Whitefish, MT: Kissinger, 2004), 55.
64. Lee Baker, “ ‘The Racist Anti-Racism of American Anthropology,” Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University, March 4, 2021.
65. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 154.
66. Nearly 150 years later, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Obie award-winning play An Octoroon reinterpreted and revised Boucicault’s play, making the issue of adjudication central. After restaging the central scene—overseer McClosky’s treacherous murder of an enslaved boy, Paul, being captured on film, and his attempt to frame the indigenous man Wanhotee for Paul’s murder—the play breaks through the fourth wall, offering a bridge from the present to the past. Jacobs-Jenkins interjects: “we’ve gotten so used to photos and photographic images that we’ve basically learned how to take them, so the kind of justice around which this whole thing hangs is actually a little dated.”
67. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 154.
68. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 20.
69. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 34; and Sheldon Faulkner, “The ‘Octoroon’ War,” Educational Theatre Journal 15, no. 1 (March 1963): 33–38.
70. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 29–30.
71. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 30.
72. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 3.
73. Volpe, “Embodying the Octoroon: Abolitionist Performance at the London Crystal Palace, 1851.” See Dorothy Sterling, “Free at Last,” in Black Foremothers: Three Lives, 2d ed. (New York: Feminist Press, 1988), 25. See also “Eyre, Artemus Ward and Ellen Craft,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, January 16, 1867, 1.
74. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 81. Macon, Georgia’s issue of the Georgia Telegraph on February 13, 1849, ran a reprint about the Crafts from a New England newspaper. There was one difference: the addendum at the end read, “The Mr. and Mrs. Crafts who figure so largely in the above paragraph will be recognized at once by our city leaders as the slaves belonging to Dr. Collins and Mr. Ira H. Taylor, of this place, who runaway [sic] or were decoyed from their owners in December last.” See Sterling, Black Foremothers, 25–26; “William and Ellen Crafts, [sic]” Lowell Daily Citizen and News (MA), September 9, 1869, 2.
75. “William Wells Brown to William Lloyd Garrison,” The Liberator, January 12, 1849.
76. For her to speak on stage would have gone against all nineteenth-century Victorian customs for women in the presence of a mixed-gender audience. As McMillan notes, she could “speak through her body.” See Uri McMillan, “Ellen Craft’s Radical Techniques of Subversion,” e-misférica: Performance and Politics in the Americas 5, no. 2 (2008). Also see McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2015).
77. Sterling, Black Foremothers, 22, 23, 26.
78. “England; October,” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, September 10, 1869, 4. Also see Sterling, Black Foremothers, 50.
79. Foreman, “Who’s Your Mama?,” 508, 527. The italics in the text are Foreman’s own.
80. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 46.
81. John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (New York: Longmans, Green, 1908), 249.
82. The sense of the divide between Asia and the West would remain even in allusions to the region in twentieth-century literature. In Brecht’s play The Caucasian Chalk Circle, for example, set after World War II in the Caucasus mountains, the chalk circle itself is an allusion to a Chinese legend and a story of Solomon’s judgment in the Bible.
83. Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 2017); Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, 2012).
84. George Kennan, “The Mountains and the Mountaineers of the Eastern Caucasus,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York no. 5 (1874): 177. Kennan delivered this speech in December of 1873.
85. Quoting Vissarion Belinsky in Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 15. Not only did this region inspire literature and theatrical productions of imaginative license, panegyric prose, and poetry, but the texts often focused on Circassian women as well. See Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 4.
86. Faddei Bulgarin launched a satirical public attack on Pushkin’s African ancestry in August 1830, which prompted the poet to respond. In the letter to Pushkin, Nashchokin wrote, “I am sending you your ancestor with inkwells that open and reveal him to be a farsighted person [a double vue].” See Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Ludmilla A. Trigos, “Introduction: Was Pushkin Black and Does It Matter?” in Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, ed. C. T. Nepomnyashchy, N. Svobodny, and L. A. Trigos (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 18; J. Thomas Shaw, “Pushkin on His African Heritage: Publications during His Lifetime,” in Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, ed. C. T. Nepomnyashchy, N. Svobodny, and L. A. Trigos (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 93–94.
87. Nepomnyashchy and Trigos, “Introduction,” 18.
88. While in the Caucasus, Pushkin wrote the poems “The Caucasus,” “Avalanche,” and “Monastery of Mount Kazbek,” in addition to The Journey to Arzrum (1836), which extends the motif of escaping the social confines of an “elite cultural milieu” that runs throughout The Prisoner of the Caucasus. The final text was based on his notes from his travels along the Russo-Turkish border. Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: The Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 396.
89. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1937–1959) [hereafter PSS] 7: 61; David M. Bethea, “How Black Was Pushkin? Otherness and Self-Creation,” in Nepomnyashchy, Svobodny, and Trigos, Under the Sky of My Africa, 138.
90. In a June 24, 1824, letter, Pushkin states, “One can think of the fate of the Greeks in the same way as the fate of my brother Negroes, and one can wish both of them liberation from unendurable slavery.” PSS 13:99, Nepomnyashchy and Trigos, “Introduction,” 15. In fall 1824, on a visit to the brother of his great-grandfather, Petr Abramovich, “my old Negro of a Great-uncle” as Pushkin would call him, Pushkin studied the German notes about his father’s biography recounted to him in childhood. Pushkin left Abramovich’s home with them in his possession and would go on to make his heritage public with many of his texts. See “Introduction,” 7. It was well known that Pushkin’s great-grandfather, christened Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was born in sub-Saharan Africa, though scholars would debate from where, precisely, until well into the twentieth century. Dieudonné Gnammankou has now established that Pushkin’s great-grandfather’s place of birth was Logon, part of what is now within the state of Cameroon, near Lake Chad. Part of his evidence rests on a letter that Gannibal wrote to Empress Elizabeth I in 1742 in which he claims, “I was born in the domain of my father, in the town of Logon.” See N. K. Teletova, “A. P. Gannibal: On the Occasion of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander Pushkin’s Great-Grandfather,” Under the Sky of My Africa, 51, n.10.
91. Abram Tertz, Strolls with Pushkin, trans. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 49. Also see Richard C. Borden, “Making a True Image: Blackness and Pushkin Portraits,” in Under the Sky of My Africa, 174.
92. Nabokov quoted in Liza Knapp, “Tsvetaeva’s ‘Blackest of Black’ (Naicherneishii) Pushkin,” Under the Sky of My Africa, 279.
93. Borden, “Making a True Image,” 182.
94. The friend was Pavel Voinovich Nashchoken. Borden, “Making a True Image,” 179.
95. Maria Tsvetaeva quoted in Knapp, “Tsvetaeva’s ‘Blackest of Black’ (Naicherneishii) Pushkin,” 279.
96. In 1828, the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, published a piece about Pushkin’s great-grandfather as “evidence for what William Wells Brown called the ‘genius, capacity, and intellectual development’ of black people.” See Gates, “Foreword,” Under the Sky of My Africa, xii. In 1847, American abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier would raise the writer to “the status of a black icon,” when the abolitionist newspaper The National Era published an article about Pushkin’s heritage and high standing in Russian society.
97. National Era, February 11, 1847, 147. Pushkin’s biography became a subject of interest that often filtered into readings of his Caucasus-based prose in Russia and beyond. The American public was aware that Pushkin had been “banished to the Caucasus,” as the Connecticut Gazette put it in January 1830. See Connecticut Gazette 67, no. 3455 (January 1830), 2. Pushkin had fled to the Russian “South” in defiance of the Russian authorities from May through November 1829. When he was in the Caucasus for the second time he wrote the poems “The Caucasus,” “Avalanche,” “Monastery of Mount Kazbek,” and The Journey to Arzrum (1836). The motif of escaping the social confines of an “elite cultural milieu” runs throughout The Prisoner of the Caucasus—in the poema, a young Russian man leaves for the Northern Caucasus and there falls in love with a Circassian, Fatima, a name of one of Barnum’s Circassian Beauties. Harsha Ram and Susan Layton argue that Pushkin’s own narrative persona comes through in The Journey to Arzrum such that it becomes a prismatic text through which one can see Pushkin “ponder his personal and cultural identity.” See Ram, Imperial Sublime, 396; Layton, Russian Literature and Empire.
98. “Married in a Snowstorm” was printed in New Hampshire Sentinel, August 15, 1872, 1; Jackson Citizen Patriot (Jackson, MI), August 17, 1872, 3; and Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), September 21, 1872, (supplement), 1. For “Queen of Spades” see “The September Magazines,” St. Albans Daily Messenger (St. Albans, VT), August 21, 1876, 2. For Marie see “Marie!” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), January 25, 1877, 1. And for The Final Shot see “The Final Shot,” New Haven Register, July 21, 1887, 3; and “The Final Shot,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), July 22, 1887, 3.
99. “Literature and Recent Essays in Literary Criticism by Henry Holt Hutton,” Quincy Daily Whig (Quincy, IL), December 12, 1876, 4.
100. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 14, 16.
101. Addressing such silences is nothing new for the field of Black Studies. In her exemplary methodology, for example, Farah Jasmine Griffin speaks about how black women scholars dedicate themselves to “make sense of the silence that surrounds black women’s lives and experiences.” See Griffin, Beloved Sisters, Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854–1868 (New York: Knopf, 1999), 3, as well as the incisive model of critical fabulation crafted by Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008).
102. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 2–33.
103. Dexter W. Fellows and Andrew A. Freeman, This Way to the Big Show (New York: Viking, 1936), 293.
104. Quoted in Bogdan, “The Social Construction of Freaks,” in Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 238. See also John Dingess, unpublished manuscript, Hertzberg Circus Collection, Witte Museum, San Antonio, TX, ca. 1899, 923–926.
105. “Knickerbocker Gossip: Topics That Interest the People of the Metropolis,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, December 4, 1880, 5.
106. Scientific American, March 28, 1908; New York Medical Journal, n.d. (available online at www
107. “The Jackson Whites,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 17, 1922, 36.
108. “A Community of Outcasts,” Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science, and Art 7 (1872): 325.
109. “Jackson Whites,” 36.
110. For “peerless” see “Fondling Snake. Diamond Rattles Are Said to Make Good Pets When Handled Properly,” Biloxi Daily Herald, February 19, 1902, 2; and “Right Way to Handle Snakes. Won’t Bite unless They’re Angry,” Charlotte Observer, December 23, 1901, 5. Also see “Barnum,” Charlotte Daily Observer, August 27, 1911, 4.
111. “She Was the Limit,” Trenton Evening Times, February 12, 1910, p. 12. Also see “She Was the Limit,” Gulfport Daily Herald (Biloxi, MS), April 12, 1910, 6.
112. “Knickerbocker Gossip: Topics That Interest the People of the Metropolis,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, December 4, 1880, 5.
113. “The Beautiful Circassian,” Kansas City Star, July 26, 1885, 16.
114. Scholars such as Sianne Ngai have argued that Dietrich’s performance of the Circassian-like performer in the Hot Voodoo scene in Blonde Venus is an oblique inversion of “Black Venus” Josephine Baker. See Sianne Ngai, “Black Venus, Blonde Venus,” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 145–178; Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase, Josephine: The Hungry Heart (New York: Random House, 1993); James A. Snead, White Screens / Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (New York: Routledge, 1994), 72.
115. Adams, Sideshow USA, 14.
116. Painter, History of White People, 71.
117. See Box 36: Clippings, 1917–1920, 1931, James G. Harbord Papers, Library of Congress; “General J. G. Harbord Narrowly Escapes Capture by Bandits,” August Chronicle,October 24, 1919, 8.
118. “Strange-Looking Men Speak a Language Nobody in Immigrant Service Understands,” Baltimore America, March 18, 1911, 1, reprinted in Trenton Evening Times, March 18, 1911, 7.
119. The literature on European immigrants and their negotiated entrance into the category of whiteness is too vast to cite here fully, but key works include Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); David R. Roediger, Working towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Peter Mesenhöller, Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits, 1905–1920 (New York: Aperture, 2005); Patrick R. O’Malley, The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023).
120. Jennifer L. Hochschild and Brenna Marea Powell, “Racial Reorganization and the United States Census, 1850–1930: Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race,” Studies in American Political Development 22 (Spring 2008): 59–96, quotation on 90. They conclude that “geographers and demographers might shake up the study of American political development.” This is most acutely possible through using the framework of an emphatically visual analysis of mapping—an increasingly vital method of measuring social life in the United States. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin, 2019); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights, ed. Jane Dailey, Glenda Gilmore, and Bryant Simon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
121. Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and Census in Modern Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 188.
122. Hochschild and Powell in “Racial Reorganization” cite that the reason for this lack of instruction could be that it was practiced, or as Margo Anderson notes, the information is harder to ascertain because a fire destroyed many of the 1890 Census original schedules. Margo Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). Statisticians, congressmen (all men at the time), and census officials all registered their concerns about the instability of both assessment and the boundaries of racial categories. See Richmond Mayo-Smith, “On Census Methods,” Political Science Quarterly 5 (1890): 260. For more on racial classification and the census, see Jennifer Hochschild and Velsa Weaver, “Policies of Racial Classification and the Politics of Racial Inequality,” in Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality, ed. Joe Soss, Jacob Hacker, and Suzanne Mettler (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007), 159–182; Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 188; Brendan A. Shanahan, “Enforcing the Colorline and Counting White Races: Race and the Census in North America, 1900–1941,” American Studies 44, no. 3 (2014): 293–307.
123. As Ian Haney López writes, naturalization itself did not generate formal court proceedings, but there were many racial prerequisite cases about the definition of the term Caucasian at the federal or even Supreme Court level. Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 1, 36.
124. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 158.
125. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 160. For more on the significance of Asian exclusion to the formation of citizenship and immigration, see scholarship including Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
126. Lauren Kroiz has used “composite” to describe what she argues is a discourse about racial “difference” in modernism, citing another use of the term by poet Benjamin de Casseres in a 1910 issue of Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work. For Kroiz, this “conflicted and shifting racial discourse at the turn of the century was fundamental to the formulation of modern art.” Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, The Phillips Collection, 2012), 2, 8.
127. Jill Lepore, “A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 2 (May / April 2019): 10–19.
128. David W. Blight, “The Possibility of America: Frederick Douglass’s Most Sanguine Vision of a Pluralist National Rebirth,” The Atlantic (December 2019): 128–130; Douglass, “Our Composite Nationality,” in The Speeches of Frederick Douglas: A Critical Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 278–303.
129. Douglass, “Our Composite Nationality,” 278–303.
130. Charmaine A. Nelson, “A ‘Tone of Voice Peculiar to New-England’: Fugitive Slave Advertisements and the Heterogeneity of Enslaved People of African Descent in Eighteenth-Century Quebec,” Current Anthropology 61, supp. 22 (October 2020): S303–S316. Nelson has elsewhere argued that the study of slavery should feature fugitive slave advertisements as a key historical source that is “fundamentally visual.” See “Art Talk with Art Historian Charmaine Nelson,” Field Trip: Art Across Canada website, December 4, 2020, https://
131. Ex parte Shahid, 205 Fed. 813 (1013); Haney López, White by Law, 54–55.
132. Smith cited in Haney López, White by Law, 55.
133. Haney López, White by Law, 55.
134. Frederick Douglass, “Lessons of the Hour,” January 9, 1894. Douglass gave many variations of this speech in the last year of his life. Douglass, “Lessons of the Hour,” in Portable Frederick Douglass, 377–410.
135. Lawrence Oliphant, The Russian Shores of the Black Sea in the Autumn of 1852: With a Voyage down the Volga, and a Tour through the Country of the Don Cossacks (New York: Redfield, 1854).
136. Gates, “Foreword,” Stony the Road, xii.
1. This often-cited comment was first noted in Norbert Heerman, Frank Duveneck (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 1. See André Dombrowski, “ ‘Everything Is Moist’: Frank Duveneck and Munich’s Painterly Realism,” in Frank Duveneck: American Master, ed. Julie Aronson (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2020), 51–52, n.4. First cited in J. Nilsen Laurvik, “Frank Duveneck” in Catalogue De Luxe of the Department of Fine Arts, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, ed. John Ellingwood, Donnell Trask, and J. Nilsen Laurvik (San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1915), 1–29.
2. Henry James called him “an unsuspected man of genius” in The Nation, June 3, 1875.
3. Huey Copeland, Sampada Aranke, Faye R. Gleisser, “Let’s Ride: Art History after Black Studies,” Artforum (October 2023).
4. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 2015), 106.
5. “Duveneck’s Painting,” Boston Daily Advertiser, March 6, 1877.
6. Julie Aronson, “A Tale of Two Cities: Cincinnati, Boston, and Duveneck’s Reputation,” in the exhibition catalogue Frank Duveneck: American Master (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2020), 36. As mentioned in Chapter 2, this is part of the idea of skeptical vision that Michael extended here to discuss racial formation. See Leja, Looking Askance.
7. On the idea of “epistemological worries,” see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007), 35.
8. Woodrow Wilson, “Mere Literature,” Atlantic Monthly (December 1893): 820–828.
9. “The Circassian Revolt,” The Daily Critic (Washington, DC), July 31, 1876; “Revolt of the Mahomedans,” The Daily Critic, May 14, 1877, 7; “By Telegraph. Troops for Salt Lake. The Russians Crossing the Danube. The Mahamedan Insurrection,” Daily Critic, May 15, 1877, 1; “Trouble in the Caucasus,” New York Herald, November 1, 1886, 4.
10. With enormous gratitude to Matthew Wittman, curator at the Houghton Library, for so generously directing me to materials related to the route of Barnum’s show in the Houghton archive at Harvard. See R. Arnold and P. T. Barnum, Statistics of P. T. Barnum’s New and Greatest Show on Earth, for the Season of 1876: Through the Principal Cities and Towns in the Eastern and Middle States and British Provinces (Buffalo, NY: Courier Co., 1876).
11. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 19, 162–208.
12. Tanya Sheehan, “A Time and a Place: Rethinking Race in American Art History,” in A Companion to American Art, ed. John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, and Jason D. LaFountain (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 49–67.
13. Foundational scholarship in visual culture and cultural studies often treats the instability of racial construction in historic context by discussing the instability of the very category of the Caucasus. This literature is vast. Salient texts include Tavia Amolo Ochieng’ Nyongó, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), Kirsten Pai Buick, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), and Adrienne R. Brown, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
14. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 82; Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 5.
15. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 3. Stoler’s account is focused on Dutch colonial archives with methodological applicability beyond this. I read Stoler’s comment here, as does Charmaine Nelson, as an invitation to consider other reasons. See “Art Talk with Art Historian Charmaine Nelson,” Field Trip: Art across Canada website, December 4, 2020, https://
16. Evelynn Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (1994): 126–145.
17. Of the many exemplary texts here is Steven Nelson’s discussion of the marriage of representation, absence, vision, and subjectivity in African American art history. See Steven Nelson, “Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: Race, Representation, and the Beginnings of an African American History of Art,” in Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002), 283–294.
18. Here I am thinking of a reflection by Alexander Nemerov about the distinction between art and the archives, challenging us to consider whether locating a work in the archive ever fully “explains a work of art,” and arguing that this is less possible than our practices and art historical methods train us to believe. Alexander Nemerov, “Art Is Not the Archive,” Archives of American Art Journal 56, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 77–83.
19. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 26–27. While I’m focused here on structural silence, this chapter is inspired by Kirsten Pai Buick’s deft analysis and parallel method for considering the silences in art history as a product of a sequential set of decisions in key, authoritative texts in American art. See Buick, “Confessions of an Unintended Reader: African American Art, American Art, and the Crucible of Naming,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History (New York: Routledge, 2020), 82–91, and “Seeing the Survey Anew: Compositional Absences That Structure Ideological Presences,” American Art 34, no. 3 (Fall 2020): 24–30.
20. Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson, “Introduction,” in Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2021), 16; Nicholas Mirzoeff, White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023).
21. Walter Muir Whitehill, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Centennial History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970), vol. 1, 40.
22. The only other signature that comes close to this prominence is his self-portrait from circa 1878. See the reproduction of “Self-Portrait,” ca. 1878, Courtesy of Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, in Frank Duveneck: American Master, 191. Duveneck altered his style for his signatures from work to work. A range is shown in Frank Duveneck: American Master, 156–157.
23. Michael Quick, An American Painter Abroad: Frank Duveneck’s European Years (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1987), 10. After Mahonri Sharp Young’s analysis of Duveneck’s work in the 1960s, scholars began to feature the larger set of the painter’s contributions. See Robert Neuhaus, “The Two Worlds of Frank Duveneck,” American Art Journal 1, no. 1 (1969): 92–103; “Duveneck’s Painting,” Boston Daily Advertiser, March 6, 1877, col. D.
24. Sarah Burns, “A Dangerous Class of Painting: Ugliness, Masculinity, and the Munich Style in Gilded Age America,” in Frank Duveneck: American Master, 73–85.
25. When Duveneck painted A Circassian, the younger sister of Louisa May Alcott, May Alcott Nieriker, wrote, “Much is said just now in favor of the Munich school,” in Studying Art Abroad, and How To Do It Cheaply. Duveneck was part of the reason for the popularity, as opposed to, say, Düsseldorf. On the role of Munich in artistic training, see Susanne Boller, American Artists in Munich: Artistic Migration and Cultural Exchange Processes, ed. Christian Fuhrmeister, Hubertus Kohle, and Veerle Thielemans (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), and Elizabeth Wylie, Explorations in Realism, 1870–1880: Frank Duveneck and His Circle from Bavaria to Venice (Framingham, MA: Danforth Museum of Art, 1989).
26. Elizabeth Boott cited in Dombrowkski, “Everything Is Moist,” 53.
27. Henry James, “Of Some Pictures Lately Exhibited,” The Galaxy, 20, no. 1 (July 1875).
28. Frank Duveneck (New York: Chapellier Gallery, 1972), 129.
29. Dombrowski, “Everything Is Moist,” 59.
30. Burns, “Dangerous Class of Painting,” 73–85. As Lisa N. Peters notes in her review of the Duveneck exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Burns and Dombrowski seem to present two different views on the reception of Duveneck’s work in the US context. See Lisa N. Peters, review of Frank Duveneck: American Master, in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 7, no. 1 (Spring 2021), https://
31. Burns, “Dangerous Class of Painting,” 73–74.
32. Burns, “Dangerous Class of Painting,” 85.
33. Mary Kinkead of Lexington, Kentucky, studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1886 to 1891. In 1890, Duveneck was hired to create a school that would serve as a contrast to the McMicken School at the Art Academy. Kinkead began studies with Duveneck during that initial period. See Rachel Sadinsky to John Wilson, October 8, 1997, Archives of the University of Kentucky Art Museum; and Josephine W. Duveneck, Frank Duveneck: Painter-Teacher (San Francisco: John Howell Books, 1970), 129–131.
34. For a methodological parallel on the silence surrounding the history of black models in Euro-American art history, see Denise Murrell, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press with The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2018); and Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).
35. Sidney Kaplan, “The Negro in the Art of Homer and Eakins,” Massachusetts Review 7, no. 1 (Winter 1966): 105–120.
36. Edgar Preston Richardson, Painting in America: The Story of 450 Years (Cornwall, NY: Crowell, 1956), 274–275.
37. Holger Cahill and Alfred H. Barr Jr., Art in America: A Complete Survey (New York: Reynel & Hitchcock, 1935); Henry McBride, “Studying Art in Europe,” New York Sun, April 16, 1938.
38. William Walton, “Art, Two Schools of: Frank Duveneck, Frederick C. Frieseke: Illustrated,” Scribner’s Magazine 58 (1915): 643–646.
39. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 155.
40. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 181.
41. Emma Acker, “A Pageant of American Art: Constructing Nation and Empire at the Fair,” in the exhibition catalogue Jewel City: Art from San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 111–124; Robert W. Rydell, “The Expositions in San Francisco and San Diego: Toward the World of Tomorrow,” in All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 208–233. For more on public art, see Abigail Margaret Markwyn, “The Spectacle of the Fair,” in Empress San Francisco: The Pacific Rim, the Great West, and California at the Panama- Pacific International Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 23–62.
42. Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (New York: Penguin Press, 2016), 2–3, 70.
43. Cohen, Imbeciles; Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Nell Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
44. For example, I complete this chapter at the end of the proceedings of the Legacies of Eugenics at Harvard (and Boston) conference, where scholars from Evelynn Hammonds, Paul Lombardo, and Suzanne Blier presented new research on how the imbrication of aesthetics, assessment, and pedagogy has been influenced by this formative period.
45. Marianne Kinkel, Races of Mankind: The Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 12–13.
46. Kinkel, Races of Mankind, 14.
47. Michael Quick is one of the scholars who points to 1872–1873 as the period when Duveneck worked “miracles of paint” in his technique. See Quick, American Painter Abroad, 10; Neuhaus, “The Two Worlds of Frank Duveneck.”
48. Dombrowski, “Everything Is Moist,” 52.
49. For more on the significance of collectors for assessing Duveneck’s history and biography, see Aronson, “Tale of Two Cities,” 25–49.
50. Hooper to Major General Charles Greely Loring, July 24, 1870, object files, Department of Art of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
51. See Stephen J. May, Voyage of the Slave Ship: J. M. W. Turner’s Masterpiece in Historical Context (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014).
52. Wendy W. Walters’s Archives of the Black Atlantic treats one of the fictional accounts of Hooper’s life through the centrality of her display of Turner’s painting in the novel Free Enterprise by Michelle Cliff. Cliff contrasts Hooper’s world with that of the main protagonist, Mary Ellen Pleasant, the eponymous former slave turned wealthy businessperson known for her role on the underground railroad. Michelle Cliff, Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant (1993; San Francisco: City Lights, 2004). Aronson notes this confusion as well and settles this; See Aronson, “Tale of Two Cities,” 34, 47n31.
53. It was even included in her obituary; see “Alice Hooper: Obit,” Boston Evening Transcript, September 27, 1879.
54. See William Sturgis’s will, executed on June 6, 1862, 7, Sturgis-Hooper Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. Lothrop had married Alice S. Hooper’s sister Anne Hooper, another daughter of Ann and Samuel Hooper, a Massachusetts-based lawyer and Republican congressman.
55. Alice Sturgis Hooper, “Reasons Why Women Should Vote,” The Nation, November 21, 1867, 416–418.
56. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, ed. David Barrie (London: Deutsche, 1987), 160. The relationship between John Ruskin and J. M. W. Turner occupies the back section of Gordon Parks’s novel about Turner. See Gordon Parks, The Sun Stalker: A Novel Based on the Life of Joseph Mallord William Turner (New York: Ruder Finn Press, 2002).
57. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 14.
58. Albert Boime, “Turner’s Slave Ship: The Victim of Empire,” Turner Studies 10, no. 1 (1990), 34–43. For a sense of the critical response to Boime’s assertion connecting Turner’s work to the history of the slave ship Zong’s history, see John McCoubrey, “Turner’s Slave Ship: Abolition, Ruskin, and Reception,” Word & Image 14, no. 4 (October–December 1998): 319–353.
59. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 6, 46.
60. See Norman Bryson, “Enchantment and Displacement in Turner,” Huntington Library Quarterly 49 (1986): 49–65.
61. Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 41. For more on the history of representations of slavery, see Cheryl Finley, The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). For a meditation on the work of the slave ship as motif and prompt for reflection, also see Eddie Chambers, “We Might Not Be Surprised: Visualizing Slavery and the Slave Ship in the Works of Charles Campbell and Mary Evans,” in Visualizing Slavery: Art across the African Diaspora, ed. Celeste-Marie Bernier and Hannah Durkin (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 216–217.
62. “Hieronymous Pop and the Baby,” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 61 (June 1880): 20–25.
63. Wood, Blind Memory, 42. See also Jerrold Ziff, “Turner’s ‘Slave Ship’: What Red Rag Is to a Bull,” Turner Studies 3, no. 4 (1984): 28.
64. Richard J. Powell, Going There: Black Visual Satire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, 2020); Glenda R. Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Rebecca Wanzo, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (New York: New York University Press, 2020). For more on the tradition of black comics specifically, see Brannon Costello and Qiana Whitted, eds., Comics and the U.S. South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012). Also see anthologies including Sheena Howard and Ronald L. Jackson, eds., Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Frances Gateward and John Jennings, The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
65. A Circassian had been on display in Cincinnati before coming to Boston. For more on the provenance, see Aronson, “Tale of Two Cities,” 34. There is confusion in scholarship about what precisely was shown, specifically whether or not A Circassian was displayed alongside such works as The Old Professor and Portrait of William Adams. Yet Hooper’s letter and acquisition of the work settles the fact that not only was it there; her interest in the canvas lay in the importance of its subject matter.
66. Duveneck’s character appears in Henry James’s novels The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Washington Square (1880), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Each are inspired by the relationship between Francis Boott, his daughter, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Boott, and Duveneck, who went on to marry Lizzie Boott. Colm Tóibín, “Henry James: Shadow and Substance,” in Henry James and American Painting (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 13, 15. Mahonri Sharp Young, “The Two Worlds of Frank Duveneck,” American Art Journal 1, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 92–103.
67. Colm Tóibín, “Frank Duveneck and Henry James,” in Frank Duveneck: American Master, ed. Julie Aronson (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2020), 95; Henry James, “Notes,” The Nation, September 9, 1875.
68. Hooper to Loring, July 24, 1870; Turner’s Slave Ship files, Art of Europe Department, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
69. Aronson, “Tale of Two Cities,” 25–49, 34.
70. Elliot Bostwick Davis and Dennis Carr, “Germany,” in A New World Imagined: Art of the Americas, ed. Elliot Bostwick Davis et al. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston publications, 2010), 184. Also see Paul B. Henze, “Marx on Muslims and Russians,” Central Asian Survey 6, no. 4 (1987): 33–45.
71. Aronson, “Tale of Two Cities,” 34.
72. Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 68.
73. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
74. Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 55.
75. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, “The Insistent Reveal: Louis Agassiz, Joseph T. Zealy, Carrie Mae Weems, and the Politics of Undress in the Photography of Racial Science,” in To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, ed. Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press and Aperture, 2020), 297–321.
76. Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor, Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 196. I am grateful to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham for her encouragement to consider this case as it related to the argument of this chapter. I subsequently mentioned this trial to Kalia Howell, a graduate student in Harvard University’s History of Art and Architecture department, who explored this topic for a final research paper. I would like to commend her for identifying extraordinary unpublished visual material related to this trial.
77. Smith-Pryor, Property Rites, 198.
78. Smith-Pryor, Property Rites, 197.
79. “Duveneck’s Painting,” Boston Daily Advertiser, March 6, 1877, col. D; Aronson, “Tale of Two Cities,” 34.
80. “Duveneck’s Painting.”
81. “The Fine Arts, Interesting Paintings at Doll & Richards,” Boston Daily Advertiser, October 17, 1877.
82. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).
83. For more on Orientalism and representations of empire, see Darcy Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
84. Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 34, 37. For a case study on the “visual discrimination” invited by a nuanced rendering of racial types and skin tones in the eighteenth century, see Oliver Wunsch, “Rosalba Carriera’s Four Contents and the Commerce of Skin,” Journal18 10 (Fall 2020), https://
85. Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
86. Henry James, The Real Thing and Other Tales (London: Macmillan, 1893), 55–56. For more about how this story relates to class, social identity, and the portrayal of interiority, see Smith, American Archives, 64.
87. James, Real Thing, 21.
88. Said, Orientalism, 3, 64, 360.
89. By “legible,” I am thinking of Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 25–42 via Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 9.
90. J. E. A. Smith, ed., The Proceedings at the Dedication of the Soldiers’ Monument, at Pittsfield, Mass., September 24, 1872, Including the Oration of Hon. Geo. Wm. Curtis (Pittsfield, MA: Chickering & Axtell, 1872), 10.
91. Sarah Beetham, “ ‘An Army of Bronze Simulacra’: The Copied Soldier Monument and the American Civil War,” Nierika: Revista de Estudios de Arte 4, no. 7 (January–June 2015): 34–45.
92. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London: Routledge, 1995).
93. See Michael Quick, “Frank Duveneck, Carl Marr, and the Other German-Americans in Munich, 1870–1885,” in American Artists in Munich: Artistic Migration and Cultural Exchange Processes, ed. Christian Fuhrmeister, Hubertus Kohle, and Veerle Thielemans (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), 176.
94. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 19, 162–208. For more on the Lost Cause narrative, see Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009).
95. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 162.
96. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
97. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 11.
98. Dell Upton, What Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), chap. 1, n10.
99. See Savage, Standing Soldiers, 253; John W. Thompson, An Authentic History of the Douglass Monument (1903; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 39–40.
100. Sarah Beetham, “Confederate Monuments: Southern Heritage or Southern Art?” Panorama 6, no. 1 (Spring 2002), https://
101. Carol A. Grissom, Zinc Sculpture in America, 1850–1950 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009), 509–537.
102. See Cheryl Finley, “Visual Legacies of Slavery and Emancipation,” Callaloo 37, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 1023–1032; Patricia A. Cahill and Kim F. Hall, “Forum: Shakespeare and Black America,” Journal of American Studies 54, no. 1 (February 2020): 1–11.
103. Powell, Going There, 8; Constance C. McPhee and Nadine M. Orenstein, Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), 5–6, 155; Ralph Shikes, The Indignant Eye: The Artist as Social Critic in Prints and Drawings from the Fifteenth Century to Picasso (Boston: Beacon Press,1969), 304–318. Also see Rebecca Wanzo, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 74–82.
104. Painter, History of White People, 203–204.
105. Frith Maier, “Introduction,” in Vagabond Life: The Caucasus Journals of George Kennan, ed. F. Maier (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 10.
106. “Life above the Clouds: George Kennan’s Talk about the People of the Caucasus,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 7, 1890.
107. While in St. Petersburg, he aimed to buy works by all those known for their vivid descriptions of the region, including Lermontov, Pushkin, and Tolstoy. Maier, Vagabond Life, 70.
108. Maier, Vagabond Life. See also Raffi Khatchadourian, “The Curse of the Caucasus,” The Nation, November 17, 2003, 3–36.
109. “The Caucasus: Mr. George Kennan’s Lecture on This Interesting Land,” Seattle Times, February 19, 1895.
110. George Kennan in Lecture on the Caucasus, box 63, George Kennan Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.
111. George Kennan, “The Mountains and the Mountaineers of the Eastern Caucasus,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 5 (1874): 177. Kennan delivered this speech on December 10, 1873.
112. David Fairchild, “George Kennan: The Inborn and Acquired Characteristics Which Made Him a Great Explorer of the Russian People,” Journal of Heredity 15 (October 1924): 403, quoted in Maier, Vagabond Life, 12.
113. “Recent Accessions,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 19, no. 1 (January 1924): 20–21, http://
114. Quick, American Painter Abroad, 19–20; Robert Neuhaus, Unsuspected Genius: The Art and Life of Frank Duveneck (San Francisco: Bedford, 1987), 6; American Paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, vol. 1 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1969), 100.
115. I’m grateful to former MFA, Boston curators Elliot Bostwick Davis and Cody Hartley for the access they kindly offered to their curatorial records to document this history, and for their dedication to the research it required.
116. See Cody Hartley to Erica Hirshler and Elliot Davis, “Duveneck title—A Circassian,” email correspondence, August 25, 2009.
117. Dorothy Berry, “Take Me into the Library and Show Me Myself: Toward Authentic Accessibility in Digital Libraries,” in The Past, Present, and Future of Libraries (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society Press, 2022), 111–126, https://
118. Arthur C. Danto, “Philosophy and Art,” in Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 56.
119. Gail Levin, “Anglo-Saxon: Nationalism and Race in the Promotion of Edward Hopper,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 7, no. 1 (Spring 2021), https://
120. Rose Kinsley, Margaret Middleton, and Porchia Moore, “(Re)Frame: The Case for Changing Language in the 21st-Century Museum,” Exhibition 36, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 56–63.
121. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11.
122. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of the Monte Beni. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 4 (1860; Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 4; Eddie Chambers, “African American Art History: Some Concluding Considerations,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History (New York: Routledge, 2019), 461–462.
123. Wade Roush, “The MFA Plays an Artful Mind Game with Its Visitors—And They Love the ‘Epiphany,’ ” WBUR News, November 7, 2016, https://
124. Buick, “Confessions of an Unintended Reader,” 82, and “Seeing the Survey Anew,” 29. Buick is joined by scholars including Eddie Chambers and John Bowles who also make these silences explicit. See Eddie Chambers, “The Difficulties of Naming White Things,” small axe 16, no. 2 (38) (July 2012): 186–197, and John P. Bowles, “Forum: Blinded by the White: Art and History at the Limits of Whiteness,” Art Journal 60, no. 4 (2001): 38–43.
125. See Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, “From Here We Saw What Happened: Carrie Mae Weems and the Practice of Art History,” in Carrie Mae Weems, ed. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis with Christine Garnier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 3. Also see Thompson, “A Sidelong Glance: The Practice of African Diaspora Art History in the United States,” Art History 70, no. 3 (2011): 8, 19. See Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Maurice Berger, “Are Art Museums Racist?,” Art in America 78, no. 9 (1990): 68; Maurice Berger, White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999); Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985); Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, ed. Gerardo Mosquera and Jean Fisher (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), 252–257; Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Nelson, “Emancipation and the Freed,” 284; Smith, American Archives; Nicholas Mirzoeff, Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (New York: Routledge, 2000); W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Michele Wallace, “Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 39–50; Deborah Willis, Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (New York: New Press, 1994); Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Deborah Willis, Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (Savannah, GA: Savannah College of Art and Design, 2008).
126. See Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality: Discussions in Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 4.
127. Arthur C. Danto, What Art Is (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 128.
128. Berger, Sight Unseen, 14. Jacqueline Francis, “Sights Made and Seen,” in Art and Politics in the US Capitol, special section of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 7, no. 1 (Spring 2021), https://
129. Berger, Sight Unseen, 1, 2, and 14.
130. See Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–168; Berger, Sight Unseen, 14; Berger, White Lies; Adrienne Brown, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Matthew Pratt Guterl, Seeing Race in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); W. J. T. Mitchell, Seeing through Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Painter, History of White People; Smith, American Archives; and Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
131. I have discussed this history in “From Here We Saw What Happened: Carrie Mae Weems and the Practice of Art History,” in Carrie Mae Weems, ed. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis with Christine Garnier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 1–6; Berger, “Are Art Museums Racist?,” 68; Berger, White Lies; Foster, Recodings; Glissant, “For Opacity”; Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Smith, American Archives; Mirzoeff, Diaspora and Visual Culture; Mitchell, Picture Theory; Michele Wallace, “Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 39–50; Willis, Picturing Us; Willis, Reflections in Black; Willis and Williams, Black Female Body; Willis, Constructing History.
132. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, ed. Alex Potts, trans. Francis Mallgrave (1764; Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2006), 195.
133. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
134. This work also builds on the exemplary scholarship of W. J. T. Mitchell and Martin Berger, both of whom have deftly discussed the imbrication of race and vision, both even using at one point the same title for their books, Seeing through Race, along with that of Matthew Guterl in his work, Seeing Race in Modern America. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Seeing through Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 13; Martin A. Berger, Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
135. Michael Leja has maintained, without a discussion of racial formation, that skeptical viewing dominated late-nineteenth-century visual culture of the United States and socialized the conditioned act of “distinguishing truth from humbug.” Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 15. Also see Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
1. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” in Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Classics, 2018), 40; Jacqueline Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Indigenous Bodies: Reviewing, Relocating, Reclaiming, ed. Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Rebecca Tillett (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013); David Wallace Adams, “Education in Hues: Red and Black at Hampton Institute, 1878–1893,” South Atlantic Quarterly 76, no. 2 (Spring 1977): 159–176. I use Native here without the word American so as not to negate the sovereignty of the Indigenous people on the land we now call the United States of America. For more on these practices, see Linda Tuhawai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012); Karen Kramer, “Bringing It All Back Home,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 4, no. 2 (2018).
2. Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of The Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Hachette, 1965).
3. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 139–142; The Hampton Album, ed. Lincoln Kirstein (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 11. For more on Hampton photography and the project of uplift cinema, see Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
4. The term “negative assembly” is also indebted to Paul C. Taylor’s work, and there is a homolog here with the idea of assemblage in the context of Alexander G. Weheliye’s scholarship—via his engagement with scholars Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers, as well as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—around the idea of “racialized assemblages.” Deleuze and Guattari have discussed the precarity of a consonant idea to that of assembly, the idea of assemblage, as subject to the instability of the geographic project. See Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 47; Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (New York: Continuum, 2006), 28.
5. The editions and various versions of Tarr and McMurry’s Geographies consulted for this analysis were Tarr and McMurry Geographies, A Complete Geography (New York: Macmillan, 1902–1922).
6. See George Tolias, “Isolarii, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Century,” in The History of Cartography, ed. David Woodward, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 263–284. My study focuses on atlases, maps, and geography textbooks in the United States; it does not include the maps produced by the US Geological Survey. My research also does not include general, popular school readers such as Noah Webster’s and William H. McGuffey’s, but instead treats the less frequently studied geography readers.
7. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin, 2019).
8. Gates, Stony the Road, xxi.
9. Here I follow George Frederickson and Dylan Rodríguez and their definition of white supremacy as a set of social practices and organizations that define the production of “ ‘human’ difference,” and take on the question of how these practices are instantiated through pedagogy as a “normative” condition, per Charles Mills. See George M. Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), xi; Charles Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), chap. 6; Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 11.
10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 163–164.
11. Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and Census in Modern Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 188.
12. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6–7. See also Caroline Desbiens, “Imaginative Geographies,” in The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology, ed. Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, et al. (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2017), 1–6; and Derek Gregory, “Imaginative Geographies,” Progress in Human Geography 19, no. 4 (1995): 447–485.
13. Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Aldon Morris, “American Negro at Paris, 1900,” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, ed. Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert (Amherst, MA: W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts, Princeton University Architectural Press, 2018); Autumn Womack, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
14. Guy-Uriel Charles, “Democracy and Distortion,” Cornell Law Review 92 (2007): 601–677; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Alex Keena, Michael Latner, Anthony J. McGann, and Charles Anthony Smith, Gerrymandering the States: Partisanship, Race, and the Transformation of American Federalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Stephen K. Medvic, Gerrymandering: The Politics of Redistricting in the United States (Medford, MA: Polity, 2021); Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Norton, 2017).
15. Fred Moten, A Poetics of the Undercommons (Butte, MT: Sputnik & Fizzle, 2016), 12.
16. Susan Schulten’s study of school geography remains the most extensive treatment of the material. See Schulten’s chapters “School Geography, the ‘Mother of All Sciences,” 1880–1914,” and “School Geography in the Age of Internationalism, 1914–1950” in Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 92–117, 121–147; Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), esp. 11–18. See also Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 10–11; Laura Pulido, “Reflections of a White Discipline,” Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 42–29; Linda Peake and Audrey Koyayashi, “Policies and Practices for an Antiracist Geography at the Millennium,” Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 50–61, 50; Katherine McKittrick and Linda Peake, “What Difference Does Difference Make to Geography?” in Questioning Geography, ed. Noel Castree, Alisdair Rogers, and Douglas Sherman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 39–54.
17. Michel Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55.
18. Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 2017); Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, 2012).
19. Nell Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 111, 151–164, 188, 212, 226.
20. Martin Brückner, “Literacy for Empire: The ABCs of Geography and the Rule of Territoriality in Early Nineteenth-Century America,” in Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victoria Age to the American Century, ed. Helena Michie and Ronald Thomas (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Matthew Edney, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Schulten, Geographical Imagination, 5.
21. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
22. Schulten, Geographical Imagination, 6. Also see Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (A “Minor” History) (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 47–51. Roland Bentacourt distinguishes this “minor history” from the framework of microhistory, the productive examination of a discreet aspect of social life to illuminate its broader claims and developments. See Roland Bentacourt, Byzantine Intersectionality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
23. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 38, 45.
24. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” New Literary History 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1974): 11. In W. J. T. Mitchell’s probing analysis of this idea, the idea of “assembly” is not considered, although maps show us how literal this act was. W. J. T. Mitchell, Seeing through Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 23.
25. Paul C. Taylor, Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 3. Also see Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); and Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
26. Taylor, Black Is Beautiful, 3.
27. As Dennis Cosgrove notes, “mapping’s record is not confined to the archival; it includes the remembered, the imagined, the contemplated.” Dennis Cosgrove, Mapping (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 1–2.
28. Schulten, Geographical Imagination, 26; Johnson’s New Illustrated Family Atlas of the World (New York: A. J. Johnson, 1873). For more on geography texts keeping up with the latest discoveries, see Donald C. Dahmann, Geography in America’s Schools, Libraries, and Homes (Washington, DC: National Council for Geographic Education, 2010), lxx–lxxi.
29. Schulten, Geographical Imagination, 18. See also Patricia Cline Cohen, “Statistics and the State: Changing Social Thought and the Emergence of a Qualitative Mentality in America, 1790 to 1820,” William and Mary Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1981): 35–55.
30. Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019), 8, 9–11, 18–19. For more on “map-as-logo” see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 170–178.
31. Arthur Tsutsiev, trans. Nora Seligman Favorov, Atlas of the Ethno-Political History of the Caucasus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 3–4. For more about the Caucasus as a limit zone in medieval maps, see Rouben Galichian, Countries South of the Caucasus in Medieval Maps: Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan (London: Printinfo Art Books / Gomidas Institute, 2007).
32. Nicole Fleetwood, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 9–10; W. J. T. Mitchell, Seeing through Race, 13; and W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 13.
33. In terms of accessibility, Schulten has noted the difficulty of researching map material due to how the material is interleaved within other bound publications. What are often imprecisely called thematic maps often remain unseen because they lie “scattered in treatises, journals, reports, and textbooks.” Schulten, Mapping the Nation, 3.
34. Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).
35. I flag this because I believe it is important to discuss the “extra labor at the archives” required for what Trouillot calls the “unearthing of silences.” Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 58. For more about the Caucasus as a limit zone in medieval maps, see Galichian, Countries South of the Caucasus.
36. In this “extractive” conceptualization, I am considering the work of Kathryn Yussof in the framework of geology through a critique of the grammar of geography. Kathryn Yussof, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
37. Scribner-Black was printed and engraved in Scotland, but distributed in the United States.
38. Reverend Kensey Johns Stewart, A Geography for Beginners (Richmond, VA: J. W. Randolph, 1864), 114–115.
39. Francis Walker, Discussions in Economics and Statistics, vol. 2: Statistics, National Growth, and Social Economics (New York: Henry Holt, 1899), 447. For more on Walker’s maps, see Schulten, Mapping the Nation, 185–195.
40. It is worth noting that the preface of many of the Scribner atlases mentions that the book was continually revised. Many were based on “Black’s General Atlas of the World which was first published in 1839 and has been subject to continuous revision and enlargement in no less than seventeen editions, the last having appeared in 1886.” See The Scribner-Black Atlas of the World, library ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899).
41. Blumenbach’s Enlightenment-era racial tracts ushered in this fivefold categorization of humankind.
42. David Woodward, The All-American Map: Wax Engraving and Its Influence on Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 16–28, 118–119.
43. Schulten, Geographical Imagination, 23, 24.
44. Schulten, Geographical Imagination, 26, 31; Woodward, All-American Map.
45. The history of what Jennifer Roberts has aptly called the negative intelligence of printmaking is wedded to the development of racial formation in the United States. See Jennifer Roberts, “Reversing American Art,” National Gallery of Art (2013), https://
46. By the 1870s, even the dictionary definition of the term Caucasian changes. In the mid-nineteenth century, the entry in Webster’s for the term Caucasian was geographical, “pertaining to Mount Caucasus in Asia.” See An American Dictionary of the English Language Exhibiting the Origin, Orthography, Pronunciation, and Definitions of Words by Noah Webster, LL.D. (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam, 1869). Circa 1869, Webster’s began to print a second entry for Caucasian: a noun, defined as “Any one belonging to the Indo-European race, and the white races originating near Mount Caucasus.” See An American Dictionary of the English Language, by Noah Webster, LL.D. (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam, 1875).
47. To the right in this image is a diagram of a “Chinaman,” evidence of the negotiations about the contours of the definition of the term Caucasian in the 1880s, as discussed in Chapter 2.
48. As early as the 1888 volume of Cram’s, this diagram has been deleted from the pages. See Cram’s Unrivaled Family Atlas of the World Indexed (1888).
49. S. Augustus Mitchell, A System of Modern Geography Designed for the Use of Schools and Academies (Philadelphia: J. H. Butler & Co., 1877). Van Ingen & Snyder operated out of a wood engraving shop in Philadelphia between 1853 and 1873. Among the books that feature these engravings are Anno Domini, The Suppressed Book about Slavery! Prepared for the Public 1857, Never Published until the Present Time (New York: Carleton, 1864) and Franz Hoffman, The Treasure of the Inca (Philadelphia: Lutheran Board of Publication, 1870).
50. See, e.g., S. Augustus Mitchell, Mitchell’s New Intermediate Geography: A System of Modern Geography for Use of Schools and Academies (Philadelphia: J. H. Butler and Co., 1877); National Standard Atlas of the World (Chicago: Ford Dearborn Publishing, 1896).
51. Within the over two-hundred-page atlas, it is the only page containing figures save a set of engravings of US presidents. The engravings, ordered chronologically, appear first, set opposite overview maps of the world sliced into sections, starting with Mexico, then South America, then an image of the four corners of the globe across from a map of Europe.
52. Cram’s Unrivaled, 13–14.
53. On the affordability of maps, see Martin Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860 (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
54. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 253–264.
55. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1993), x.
56. Wexler, Tender Violence, 132; Sarah Meister, The Hampton Album (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2019), 8–11.
57. These new features in the science building, such as “the moulding tables where ten or twelve may mold at once” are a source of pride at Hampton in the principal’s report from 1890. The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Principal’s Report for Year Ending June 30, 1890 (Hampton, VA: Normal School Steam Press Print, 1890), 39. A condensed version of this report (with a mention of Yaggy’s Atlas) was also published as: S. C. Armstrong, “The Twentieth Annual Report of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, July 1890,” in Virginia School Reports, 1890 and 1891, Twentieth and Twenty-First Annual Reports of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the Commonwealth of Virginia with Accompanying Documents (Richmond, VA: J. H. O’Bannon, Superintendent of Public Printing, 1891), 236–263.
58. See Rita Barnard, “Of Riots and Rainbows: South Africa, the US, and the Pitfalls of Comparison,” American Literary History 17, no. 2 (2005): 399–416; Jacques Derrida, “Racism’s Last Word,” in Race, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Maurice Smethurst Evans, Black and White in the Southern States. A Study of the Race Problem in the United States from a South African Point of View (London: Longmans, Green, 1915). Also see Frederickson, White Supremacy; David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Robert Miller, “Science and Society in the Early Career of H. F. Verwoerd,” Journal of Southern African Studies 19, no. 4 (1993): 634–661; and Kirk B. Sides, “Precedence and Warning: Global Apartheid and South Africa’s Long Conversation on Race with the United States,” in Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 18, no. 3 (2017): 232.
59. As one of many examples, Charles A. McMurry notes in the Special Method in Geography: From the Third through the Eighth Grade, “the general movement is from the home and home neighborhood outward, first to the home state, then to the surrounding states, to the United States and to North America as a whole, later to Europe and the rest of the world.” See Charles A. McMurry, Special Method in Geography: From the Third through the Eighth Grade (New York: Macmillan, 1903), 15. Also see Edney, Cartography, 153; Schulten, Mapping the Nation, 11; Schulten, Geographical Imagination, 99.
60. Sides, “Precedence and Warning,” 221–238. The geography lesson typifies the imbrication of power and ideology inherent in maps as social documents as discussed by Brian Harley. See J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, ed. Dennis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); J. B. Harley and David Woodward, The History of Cartography, vols. 1 and 2, bks. 1–3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987–1998).
61. This image appears in Edith C. Westcott, The New Education Illustrated, vol. 3: Geography (Richmond, VA: B. F. Johnson Publishing, 1900), pl. 7.
62. Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
63. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 106. For a time, Washington served as head of the dormitory for Indian students. See Booker T. Washington, “Incidents of Indian Life at Hampton,” Southern Workman 10 (April 1881): 43.
64. Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues (May 1992),” Forum N.H.I. Knowledge for the 21st Century 1, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 32–67; Wynter, “Textbooks and What They Do: The Conceptual Breakthrough of Carter G. Woodson,” in Wynter, Do Not Call Us Negro: How “Multicultural” Textbooks Perpetuate Racism (San Francisco: Aspire, 1990); Mishuana Goeman, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
65. William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization; or, An Impartial Exhibit of the Doctrines, Principles, and Purposes of the American Colonization Society; Together with the Resolutions, Addresses, and Remonstrances of the Free People of Color (Boston: Garrison and Knapp, 1832).
66. Samantha Seeley, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2021).
67. Woodrow Wilson to David Lloyd-George, March 28, 1919, From the Diary of Dr. Grayson, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (hereafter PWW), ed. Arthur S. Link et al., vol. 56 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–1993), 347–348. This comparative reference to teaching geography and the work of policy emerges in other diary entries by Dr. Grayson, e.g., May 23, 1919, PWW, vol. 59, 420.
68. Brückner, “Literacy for Empire,” 209.
69. Schulten, Mapping the Nation, 163. Also see Bahar Gürsel, “Teaching National Identity and Alterity: Nineteenth Century American Primary School Geography Textbooks,” Journal of Educational Medica, Memory, and Society 10, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 106–126, esp. 106. Also see James H. Williams, “Nation, State, School, Textbook,” in (Re)constructing Memory: School Textbooks and the Imagination of the Nation, ed. James H. Williams (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2014), 1–9, esp. 1.
70. Charles A. McMurry, Special Method in Geography (New York: Macmillan, 1903), 109.
71. Sheridan Ploughe, “Edward Esher Yaggy,” in History of Reno County, Kansas: Its People, Industries and Institutions, vol. 2 (Indianapolis, Indiana: B. F. Bowen, 1917), 88–90. Edward Esher Yaggy Sr. was Levi Yaggy’s son.
72. Brückner, “Literacy for Empire,” 175, cited in “Massachusetts’ Schools,” Niles Weekly Register 20, no. 7 (1821): 108. When Carter G. Woodson obtained his teacher’s certificate in West Virginia in 1901, for example, the record shows that geography was a compulsory exam subject as well. See No. 18, “Teacher’s High School Certificate, Huntington, West Virginia Public Schools,” issued May 18, 1901, for Woodson, published in The Negro History Bulletin, (May 1, 1950), 180.
73. In Nevada, for example, where there were few school libraries and “none in rural districts,” reporting from 1887–1888 reveals that “a large number of schools, however, have been supplied with Yaggy’s Geographical Study and Yaggy’s Anatomical Study.” See N. H. R. Dawson, United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1887–1888 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889); Helen W. Ludlow, “Review of Academic Work,” in The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Principal’s Report for the Academic and Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1889 (Hampton, VA: Normal School Steam Press Print, 1889), 39–46. The specific mention of “Yaggy’s Geography Study” occurs in this report on page 42. Also see Elizabeth Hyde, “Review of Academic Work,” in The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Annual Reports for Year Ending June 30, 1890 (Hampton, VA: Normal School Steam Press Print, 1890), 36–47 (specific mention of “Yaggy’s Atlas” is on page 39).
74. As Schulten notes, Frye’s was one of the first books to come after the National Educational Association’s reform efforts after the “Committee of Ten.” Schulten, Geographical Imagination, 103. For a contemporary response to the racial bias that was part of these geography texts, see Peter Smagorinsky, “ ‘The Ideal Head’: Bizarre Racial Teachings from a 1906 Textbook,” The Atlantic, July 19, 2014, https://
75. Henry H. Rassweiler, Teacher’s Hand Book: Designed to Accompany Yaggy’s Geographical Study (Chicago: Western Pub. House, ca. 1888), 39, https://
76. Ruth Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), viii. Also see AnneMarie Brosnan, “Representations of Race and Racism in the Textbooks Used in Southern Black Schools during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1861–1876,” Paedagogica Historica 52, no. 6, (2016): 718–733. I am unaware of any study that analyzed geography textbooks used in black segregated schools. As Brosnan notes, financial constraints often meant that these schools did not use any textbooks, even as new subjects were added to the curriculum. Brosnan’s study also notes that fewer geography textbooks were published for free black students (721).
77. Elson, Guardians of Tradition, 66. Elson’s study does not include Yaggy’s manual because it was published at the turn of the twentieth century and her study focuses on the nineteenth.
78. Matthew Edney also discusses Yaggy’s Geographical Study (1887) as an example of analytical mapping. See Edney’s post on his site, Mapping as Process: A Blog on the Study of Mapping Processes: Production, Circulation, and Consumption, “Why I Don’t Like Thematic Maps,” January 2018. https://
79. Rassweiler, Teacher’s Hand Book, 39.
80. Rassweiler, Teacher’s Hand Book, 39.
81. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, “No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of the Ocean,” in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, ed. McKittrick and Woods (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2007), 4.
82. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.
83. Here Yaggy’s instructions expose maps as creating what Edney, via Bruno Latour, would call “social relations” as opposed to what is often considered a “social practice” created by the “production, circulation, and consumption” of mapping. However, whereas Edney focuses on the need to study maps as part of the “formation of class identities,” this framework must be expanded to consider racial identity formation as well. Edney, Cartography, 47; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). While this study does not focus on US Surveys, Robin Kelsey’s deft discussion of the connection between sightlines and surveys commissioned by Congress in the nineteenth century inspired much of this chapter’s method. See Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
84. Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 49.
85. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 2008), 91. All passages are from this text. Also see George Yancy, Look, A White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 1–3; and Robert Gooding-Williams, “Look, a Negro!” in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), 165.
86. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 89, 95.
87. The literature here is vast and includes, for example, talks given for WISER’s Public Positions Series “Fanon after Fanon,” hosted by the University of the Witwatersrand in 2021. See also Gavin Arnall, The Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Achille Mbembe, “Metamorphic Thoughts: The Works of Frantz Fanon,” African Studies 71, no. 1 (April 2012): 19–28; Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021); David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 3; Homi K. Bhabha, “Foreword: Framing Fanon,” in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2021), xiii–xlviii.
88. Brandon Terry, “On Fanon and Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche 13 / 13: Fanon, part of the 13 / 13 Seminars produced by the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought with the collaboration and support of the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities, January 18, 2017, https://
89. Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, “Rethinking Maps,” in Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3 (2007): 335, 343.
90. The sample of the reports from these states include N. H. R. Dawson, United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1887–1888 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889); Pennsylvania Dept. of Public Instruction, Report for the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, for the year ending June 5, 1894 [Philadelphia], 1893; and “Reports of County Superintendents,” in Common Schools of Pennsylvania, Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for the Year Ending June 5, 1893 (Clarence M. Busch, State Printer to Pennsylvania, 1893), 16. This information and report are repeated for the following counties in Pennsylvania alone: Butler County, N. C. McCollough; Northampton County, W. F. Hoch; Perry County, E. U. Aumiller; Schuylkill County, G. W. Weiss; Warren County, H. M. Putnam; Phoenixville, H. F. Leister, 24, 86, 89, 98–100, 112, 166. For reports from these states, see Jesse B. Thayer, State Superintendent, Biennial Report of the State Superintendent of the State of Wisconsin for the Two Years Ending June 30, 1888 (Madison, WI: Democrat Printing Company, State Printers, 1888); JAS. H. Rice, State Superintendent of Education, Twenty-Second Annual Report of the State Superintendent of Education of the State of South Carolina, 1890 (Columbia, SC: James H. Woodrow, State Printer, 1890); for Utah, see Ninth Annual Report of the New West Education Commission (Chicago: S. Ettlinger, Printer, 1889); “Reports of County Commissioners of Schools for the School Year 1892–93,” in Fifty-Seventh Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Michigan and Accompanying Documents for the Year 1893 (Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., State Printers and Binders, 1894); “Books and Apparatus” in Catalogue of the Schoolcraft Public School, by Order of the Board of Education, April 1892 (Kalamazoo, MI: Ihling Bros. & Everard, Printers and Binders, 1892); First Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction to the Governor of North Dakota for the Two Years Ending June 30, 1890 (Bismarck, ND: Tribune, State Printers and Binders, 1890); “Reports of Incorporated Schools,” in “Appendix G: Report of the State Board of Education,” in Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Delaware (Dover, DE: James Kirk & Son, Printers, 1891); Twenty-First Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois, July 1, 1894—June 30, 1896 (Springfield, IL: Phillips Bros., State Printers, 1896); Biennial Report of the State Superintendent of Public Education to the Legislature of Mississippi for the Scholastic Years 1889–90 and 1890–91 (Jackson, MS: Power & McNeily, State Printers, 1892); “School Supplies and Equipments [sic],” School Board Journal: We Report the Important Transactions of Every School Board in the United States and Canada 6, no. 8 (August 1894). Also see Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958, 3rd ed. (London: Taylor and Francis Group, 2004).
91. Rassweiler, Teacher’s Hand Book, 39.
92. Terrance Hayes, “What It Look Like,” in How to Be Drawn (New York: Penguin, 2015), 3.
93. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 20; Randal Marlin, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002); for a discussion of propaganda as “flawed ideology” see Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
94. See Donald Yacovone, Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity (New York: Penguin Random House, 2022); “Textbook Racism: How Scholars Sustained White Supremacy,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 8, 2018; Donald Yacovone, “Teaching White Supremacy: The Textbook Battle over Race in American History,” Harvard Gazette, September 4, 2020, https://
95. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 1860–1880 (New York: Russell, 1938), 700; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).
96. Elson, Guardians of Tradition, 66.
97. Alexander G. Weheliye, “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Graphic Modernities,” CR: The New Centennial Review 15, no. 2 (2015): 29.
98. Edney, Cartography.
99. Yacovone’s study addresses this topic from the vantage point of history textbooks. See Yacovone, “Teaching White Supremacy.”
100. Tarr and McMurry Geographies, Third Book: Europe and Other Continents with Review of North America (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 76.
101. Ralph Tarr and Frank M. McMurry, New Geographies, Second Book (New York: Macmillan, 1917).
102. Tarr and McMurry, New Geographies, Second Book, 235. Other geography texts used a similar question. S. Augustus Mitchell, A System of Modern Geography framed it this way: “What is said of the Caucasian race?” The answer in italics states, “The Caucasian race is found among the civilized nations of Europe and America, and is superior to the rest in mind, courage, and activity,” 8.
103. Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 50.
104. Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 135 quoting Henry Elson, Modern Times and the Living Past. The Elson textbook was listed in the 1929 “Louisiana High School Standards Manual of Organization and Administration (Section on Social Science Curriculum),” bulletin no. 161 (Baton Rouge: State Department of Education of Louisiana, July 1, 1929), 29, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Gutman Library Special Collections.
105. This focus on the linguistic analysis and rationale for racial science has a literature too extensive to recount here. For an incisive summary, see Painter, History of White People, 81, 196.
106. Tarr and McMurry Geographies, Third Book, 74.
107. The editions and various versions of Tarr and McMurry’s Geographies consulted for this analysis were the following: Tarr and McMurry Geographies, A Complete Geography (New York: Macmillan, 1902); Tarr and McMurry Geographies, Fourth Part, General Geography, South America and Europe (New York: Macmillan, 1905); Ralph S. Tarr and Frank M. McMurry, Advanced Geography (New York: Macmillan, 1907); Ralph S. Tarr and Frank M. McMurry, Advanced Geography (Sacramento: Robert L. Telper, Supt. State Printing, 1909); Ralph S. Tarr and Frank M. McMurry, New Geographies, Second Book (New York: Macmillan, 1913, 1916, 1917); Ralph S. Tarr and Frank M. McMurry, World Geographies, Second Book, Texas Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1919); Ralph S. Tarr and Frank M. McMurry, New Geographies, Second Book (New York: Macmillan, 1920); Ralph S. Tarr and Frank M. McMurry, New Geographies, Second Book, Part Two (New York: Macmillan, 1922).
108. Toni Morrison, “The Individual Artist,” in Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Knopf, 2019), 83. Here, we start to see the conditioning that could lead to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s formulation, “people who believe themselves to be white” (italics here are mine). See Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: One World / Random House, 2015), 42.
109. Universal Cyclopedia and Atlas, vol. 2 (of 12), by Charles Kendall Adams (President of Wisconsin, Editor-in-Chief of the New Edition) and Rossiter Johnson (Editor of Revision), with Colored Plans, Plates and Engravings (New York: D. Appleton, 1902), 405.
110. A Teacher’s Manual for the Webster-Knowlton-Hazen European History Maps (Chicago: A. J. Nystrom, ca. 1923), 92.
111. Jacques W. Redway, The New Basis of Geography: A Manual for the Preparation of the Teacher (New York: MacMillan, 1907).
112. Intelligence testing received the imprimatur of the US military, and the interest of the American public, when Carl Campbell Brigham published a primer on the topic, A Study of American Intelligence (1923). He focused on Princeton schoolchildren for his Binet tests. For more, see an extensive discussion in Painter, History of White People, 285–286. For more on geography exams, see Schulten, Geographical Imagination, 75–77, 94.
113. “Parent Anger Up over ‘Silly’ Tests: Brand Exams for Youthful Pupils Too Advanced and Ludicrous,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland), April 5, 1911, 10.
114. Jennifer Roberts emphasizes that Pierre Bourdieu “admonished scholars looking back on historical exchanges not to ‘abolish the interval’ that originally separated the actions in question.” Jennifer Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 1, 15.
115. On the topic of mobile objects, I am also considering “portability” via the work of art historian Alina Payne, who considers the significance of the displacement of objects, leaving an invaluable “geographic footprint.” Payne, “The Portability of Art: Prolegomena to Art and Architecture on the Move,” in Territories and Trajectories: Cultures in Circulation, ed. Diana Sorenson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
116. Painter created this series two years after the publication of History of White People. Her serial attention to this region suggests that despite authoring the incisive book about the construction of racial whiteness, something unstated remained to be declared and explored through other means. See, for example, “Maps and Margins” in Afro-Atlantic Histories (New York: DelMonico Books, 2021), 61–80.
117. Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 23 (1904): 421–437. Also see Imani Perry, “Unmaking the Territory and Remapping the Landscape,” in Perry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 177–180.
118. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 135.
119. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 41.
120. Mirzoeff, Right to Look; Nicholas Mirzoeff, White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023).
121. Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 46.
122. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
123. Nour Kteily and Sarah Cotterill, “Is the Defendant White or Not?” New York Times, January 23, 2015.
124. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 1.
125. Ruth Frankenberg, “The Mirage of Unmarked Whiteness,” in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, ed. Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 74.
126. Matthew Pratt Guterl, Seeing Race in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
127. Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1933).
128. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy, my italics.
129. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy, 11. In keeping with Amiri Baraka per Nathaniel Mackey, this fugitivity “slides away from the proposed.” See Nathaniel Mackey, “Cante Moro,” in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. A. Morris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 200.
130. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy, 6.
131. Edward A. Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race in America, from 1619 to 1890, with a Short Introduction as to the Origin of the Race, rev. ed. (Chicago: W. B. Conkey, 1895); Leila Amos Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro (Washington, DC: Press of R. L. Pendleton, 1912). See Jarvis R. Givens, “Teaching to ‘Undo Their Narratively Condemned Status’: Black Educators and the Problem of Curricular Violence,” in Schooling the Movement: The Activism of Southern Black Educators from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Era, ed. D. Alridge, J. Hale, and T. Loder-Jackson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2023).
132. Examples include Orland Maxfield, “Geography and the Social Studies” in Bulletin of the Arkansas Teachers Association 34, no. 2 (1966): 26, https://
133. 1900 Exposition Gold Medal Award, ca. August 1900. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
134. The full Exhibit of American Negroes includes a second installation, attributed to Thomas J. Calloway, titled A Series of Statistical Charts, Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now Resident in the United States of America. This, too, has an opening plate that includes a map. The maps were prepared by students at Atlanta University. Currently available sources suggest that William Andrew Rogers, an alumnus of Atlanta University in 1899, and a recent graduate in sociology, worked with Du Bois on these graphics. See Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Atlanta University, 1899–1900 through 1906–1907 (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press), 37; “Atlanta University Exhibit at Paris,” Atlanta Journal, February 22, 1900; Bulletin of Atlanta University 110 (1900): 3; Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 162; Britt Rusert quoted in Jackie Mansey, “W. E. B. Du Bois’ Visionary Infographics Come Together for the First Time in Full Color,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 15, 2018.
135. See “Plate 2,” W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, 52; “Progressive disclosure,” Nielsen Norman Group, https://
136. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 141. Quoted in Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, “Introduction,” in W. E. B. Du Bois et al., W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Amherst, MA: W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts, Princeton University Architectural Press, 2018), 17.
137. Eugene F. Provenzo, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Exhibit of American Negroes: African Americans at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 18. For analysis of the exhibition, please see scholarship by David Levering Lewis and Deborah Willis alongside the introduction by Linda Osborne in A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress (New York: Amistad, 2003).
138. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 34.
139. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 34. Also see “W. E. B. Du Bois: A Recorded Autobiography, Interview with Moses Asch,” Smithsonian Folkways FW05511, provided courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. ©1961. https://
140. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 34.
141. Du Bois first states this in July 1900 at the Pan-African Association’s conference in London. He traveled to Paris directly afterward. Provenzo, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Exhibit of American Negroes, 91.
142. Weheliye deftly notes that within the exposition, “diagrammatic lines” are key for Du Bois, citing this relational interest in what, as Latour articulates, “draws things together.” Weheliye, “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy,” 30, 32, 35, citing Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representations in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steven Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 19–68, 60; Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6, 45, 73, 107, 133.
143. Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, “Introduction,” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America; The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, ed. Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert (Amherst, MA: W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Princeton University Architectural Press, 2018), 19–22.
144. Frederick Douglass, “Lessons of the Hour: An Address,” in Frederick Douglass: Speeches and Writings, ed. David W. Blight (New York: Library of America, 2022), 762–790.
145. Mabel O. Wilson, “The Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Color Line,” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America: The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, ed. Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert (New York: W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Princeton Architectural Press, 2018), 39, 42; Mabel O. Wilson, Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
146. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 47.
147. Howard N. Rabinowitz, “Half a Loaf: The Shift from White to Black Teachers in the Negro Schools of the Urban South, 1865–1890,” Journal of Southern History 40, no. 4 (1974): 565–594, esp. 586. The Tennessee Act of 1873 had set geography as one of the required courses. See W. R. Garrett, Annual Report of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction for Tennessee (Dept. of Education), for the Scholastic Year Ending June 30, 1891 (Nashville, TN: Marshall & Bruce, State Printers, 1892), 16; see also “Circular No. 2, Laws Relating to the Emancipation and License of School-Teachers,” Department of Public Instruction, Nashville, Tenn., June 1, 1891.
148. Garrett, Annual Report of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction for Tennessee, 16.
149. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Twelfth Census and the Negro Problems,” Southern Workman 29 (1900): 307. For more on Du Bois’s analysis of black agriculture, see U.S. Census Office, Bulletin 8, Negroes in the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904).
150. Du Bois was singular in this space, perhaps with the exception of Charles S. Johnson, The Negro in American Civilization (1930). See Lawrence D. Bobo, “Reclaiming a Du Boisian Perspective on Racial Attitudes,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (2000): 186–202, esp. 193–195.
151. For Du Bois’s critique of Hoffman, see Du Bois, “Review: Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro by Frederick L. Hoffman,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 9, no. 1 (July 1897): 127–133; Weheliye, “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy,” 37; Womack, The Matter of Black Living; Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, “Cultural Artifacts and the Narrative of History: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exhibiting of Culture at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle,” Modern Fiction Studies 51, no. 4 (2005): 741–774; Jason Forrest, “Data Journalism in the Study of W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Negro Problem,’ ” Medium, July 31, 2018, https://
152. Megan J. Wolff, “The Myth of the Actuary: Life Insurance and Frederick L. Hoffman’s ‘Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,’ ” Public Health Reports 121, no. 1 (2006): 84–91; Julie K. Brown, “Making ‘Social Facts’ Visible in the Early Progressive Era: The Harvard Social Museum and Its Counterparts,” in Instituting Reform: The Social Museum of Harvard University 1903–1931, ed. Deborah Martin Kao and Michelle Lamunière (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Harvard Art Museums, 2012), 103–105.
153. For more on the visual epistemology of mapping, see Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), and Mirzoeff, Right to Look.
154. Douglass, “Lessons of the Hour,” 762–790.
155. For a history of the transition between the departments of Social Ethics and Sociology at Harvard, see Lawrence T. Nichols, “The Establishment of Sociology at Harvard: A Case of Organizational Ambivalence and Scientific Vulnerability,” in Science at Harvard University: Historical Perspectives, ed. Clark A. Elliott and Margaret W. Rossiter (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1992), 191–222.
156. Senators such as Henry Cabot Lodge intervened with the US Treasury Department on behalf of Peabody to obtain exhibition materials from foreign pavilions at World’s Fairs. Henry Cabot Lodge to Francis Greenwood Peabody, December 7, 1904; Peabody to Lodge, December 9, 1904, HUG 1676.582, folder L, in Letters to F. G. Peabody, concerning a Social Science Exhibit, 1903–06, Harvard University Archives.
157. For several years, the department was the department of “sociology and social ethics.” Karl Bigelow, Tutor, memo, December 11, 1928, Harvard University Committee on Sociology and Social Ethics, Committee on Concentration in Sociology and Social Ethics, 1928–1931, Harvard University Archives, 111.10.104.
158. Francis Greenwood Peabody, “Voluntary Worship 1886–1929,” in The Development of Harvard University since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869–1929, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), li–lviii; Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 163, 167. The Department of Social Ethics was initially part of the Philosophy Department at Harvard. The term “social ethics” was one that Peabody’s colleague, William James, would suggest. See James Ford, “Social Ethics, 1905–1929,” in Development of Harvard University, 223, 230.
159. “Races” was one of the ten major categories of the Social Museum’s management system, alongside “Health, Housing, Industrial Problems, Religious Agencies, Crime, Detectives, Charity, and Social Settlements.” See Appendix A in Francis Greenwood Peabody, The Social Museum as an Instrument of University Teaching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1911).
160. “W. E. B. Du Bois,” in Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Record of Class of 1890, 314, UAIII 15.75.10 F, box 1, Harvard University Archives. Peabody’s course was then Philosophy 11. See Harvard University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Announcement of Courses of Instruction Provided by the Faculty of Harvard College for the Academic Year, 1889–90 (Cambridge, MA: Published by the University, May 1889), 18.
161. Julie K. Brown, “Making ‘Social Facts’ Visible in the Early Progressive Era: The Harvard Social Museum and Its Counterparts,” in Instituting Reform: The Social Museum of Harvard University 1903–1931, ed. Deborah Martin Kao and Michelle Lamunière (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Harvard Art Museums, 2012), 94. Michelle Lamunière notes that by the 1906–1907 academic year, 146 undergraduates were enrolled in the course, of 2,247 undergraduates attending. See Potts, “Social Ethics at Harvard,” 94–95; Reports of the President and Treasurer of Harvard College 1906–07 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1908), 73, 101.
162. David Levering Lewis does not mention that Peabody taught Du Bois, but he does stress the influence of Peabody’s teaching on the social landscape at that time. See David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 71. For a discussion of the popularity of Peabody’s course, see David B. Potts, “Social Ethics at Harvard, 1881–1931: A Study in Academic Activism,” in Paul Buck, ed., Social Sciences at Harvard, 1860–1920: From Inculcation to the Open Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 91–128.
163. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 7.
164. Edwin de Turck Bechtel, Philosophy 5, Lecture Notes, 1902–3, Curriculum Collection, Harvard University Catalog, 8899.321, Harvard University Archives.
165. The collection of photographs, charts, and maps were consigned to storage for thirty years when the Department of Social Ethics was closed and merged with the Department of Sociology, only to be unearthed in the 1960s and accessioned as part of Harvard’s Museum collection. The preservation of this collection is in no small measure due to the work of Barbara (Bobbie) Norfleet, curator of photographs at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, where the Social Museum collection was held in the 1960s before being transferred to the Harvard Art Museums in 2002. Norfleet also earned her doctorate in Sociology from Harvard. See Deborah Martin Kao and Michelle Lamunière, “Acknowledgments,” in Instituting Reform: The Social Museum of Harvard University 1903–1931, ed. Kao and Lamunière (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Harvard Art Museums, 2012), 12.
166. Peabody, Social Museum, 4.
167. Papers of Francis Greenwood Peabody, 1886–1925; David Camp Rogers to Peabody, January 1, 1906, HUG 1676.582; Peabody to Guy Lowell, Esq., May 15, 1905, HUG 1676.582.2; Peabody to F. R. Cope, Jr. May 3, 1903, HUG 1676.582.2—all in Harvard University Archives. The titles were hand-lettered by students but mounted by the Department of Fine Arts.
168. Books assigned included Herbert Spencer’s Theoretical Principals of Sociology and Charles Booth’s statistical study Life and Labour of the People as well as Washington Gladden’s Applied Christianity, Evelyn Fanshawe’s Liquor Legislation in the United States and Canada, and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives. See Michelle Lamunière, “Sentiment and Science: Francis Greenwood Peabody and the Social Museum in Context,” in Instituting Reform: The Social Museum of Harvard University 1903–1931, ed. Deborah Martin Kao and Michelle Lamunière (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Harvard Art Museums, 2012), 42; David B. Potts, “Social Ethics at Harvard, 1881–1931: A Study of Academic Activism,” Social Sciences at Harvard, 1860–1920, ed. Paul Buck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 101–111.
169. Peabody, Social Museum, 1.
170. Brown, “Making ‘Social Facts’ Visible,” 99, 101, 165.
171. Lamunière, Instituting Reform, 48; Julie K. Brown, Health and Medicine on Display: International Expositions in the United States, 1876–1904 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Brown, “Making ‘Social Facts’ Visible,” 99, 105.
172. Through the research of Deborah Willis, we know the identity of the photographer, Thomas Askew, along with the identities of some of the subjects, the first time that “anyone had been named since the photos were on display in 1900.” The identities of the photographers besides Askew is not currently known. See Deborah Willis, “The Sociologist’s Eye: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Paris Exposition,” in David Levering Lewis and Deborah Willis, A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress (New York: Amistad, 2003), 67. This presentation in Paris was a distinct arrangement from how the charts appeared at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901. Nevertheless, there, too, this first plate was bookended by photographs.
173. Lewis and Willis, Small Nation of People; Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
174. For a discussion of these photographs as a “counterarchive” to the photographs that subtend the history of racial domination, see Smith, Photography on the Color Line, 12.
175. Alain Locke, “Art or Propaganda?” Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life (November 1928); also see Kobena Mercer, Alain Locke and the Visual Arts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022).
176. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis (October 1926): 290–297.
177. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art.”
178. Taylor, Black Is Beautiful, 88–99. I return to this focus on propaganda at greater length in Chapter 5.
179. Robert Gooding-Williams, “Beauty as Propaganda: On the Political Aesthetics of W. E. B. Du Bois,” in Philosophical Topics 49, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 13–33. Du Bois’s story “Jesus Christ in Texas” initially appeared in 1911 in The Crisis as “Jesus Christ in Georgia.” The updated story connects the narrative to the 1916 Waco, Texas, lynching of Jesse Washington, which prompted the NAACP to develop its anti-lynching strategy.
180. Gooding-Williams notes that he follows Joseph Leo Koerner’s reading of the painting. See Robert Gooding-Williams, “The Epiphany of the Black Magus Circa 1500” in The Image of the Black in Western Art III, Part I, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 81–92.
181. For more on “undisciplining cartography,” see Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier, “An Introduction to Critical Cartography,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4, no. 1 (2005): 12. On “undisciplining” racial data, see Womack, Matter of Black Living, 8. For more on “racial data revolutions” also see Khalil Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 19.
182. For a consideration of how a study of aesthetics might have influenced Du Bois’s seminal text The Souls of Black Folk (1903), see Anne E. Carroll’s analysis of Du Bois’s rigorous study of aesthetics. Carroll suggests his potential influence by Richard Wagner’s conceptualization of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art.” See Anne E. Carroll, “Du Bois and Art Theory: The Souls of Black Folk as a ‘Total Work of Art,’ ” Public Culture 17, no. 2 (2005): 235–254.
183. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Bob Blaisdell ed., W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections from Hist Writings (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2014), 165; Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” The Independent 69 (August 18, 1910): 339–342. For more on Du Bois and rhetoric, see Melvin Rogers, “The People, Rhetoric, and Affect: On the Political Force of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 1 (February 2012): 194–195.
184. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
185. Bobo, “Reclaiming a Du Boisian Perspective,” 187; Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied.
186. Tarr and McMurry Geographies, Third Book, 76.
187. Du Bois drew on his essay “On the Culture of White Folk” for the Darkwater volume along with the essay, “The Souls of White Folk,” from 1910. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” The Independent 69 (August 18, 1910): 339–42; Du Bois, “On the Culture of White Folk,” Journal of Race Development 7, no. 4 (1917): 434–447.
188. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Bob Blaisdell ed., W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections from His Writings (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 172. The volume contains the unabridged 1920 essay first published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York.
189. Du Bois, Darkwater, 23, italics in the original. Here we have an example of what McKittrick and Woods call the centrality of “black geographies” for the “reconstruction of the global community.” McKittrick and Woods, “No One Knows the Mysteries,” 6.
190. Robert Gooding-Williams, “W. E. B. Du Bois,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (first published September 13, 2017). See section 3.3: Historical Inquiry and Moral Knowledge, https://
191. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Touchstone, 1935), 713–715, 725.
192. Alain Locke, Negro Art: Past and Present (Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936), 45–46. “A hundred years from now,” an 1879 review asserted, Homer’s “pictures [of blacks] alone will have kept him famous.” See “American Art in Water Colors. The Twelfth Annual Exhibition of the Water Color Society in the National Academy,” New York Evening Post, March 1, 1879, 1, cited in Richard J. Powell, “Introduction: Winslow Homer, Afro-Americans, and the ‘New Order of Things,’ ” Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years, exh. cat. (Austin: The Menil Collection and University of Texas, Austin, 1988), 9. For more on the petition, see Natalie Spassky, “Winslow Homer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (1982): 39. For a reading of Homer’s handling of black figures that offers a contrasting context to Locke’s praise, see Gwendolyn Du Bois Shaw, “ ‘The Various Colors and Types of Negroes’: Winslow Homer Learns to Paint Race,” in Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents (New Haven, CT: Metropolitan Museum and Yale University Press, 2022), 44–52, 185–186. What is at issue in this chapter is not how Homer painted black figures, but what his retort shows about the status of mapping by the turn of the twentieth century as an arbiter of racialized American society. The painting was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in 1906 after being shown at the National Academy of Design in New York.
193. Derek Walcott would seize on the directionality of the subject’s face. He imagined in his poem Omeros that the figure was between “our island and the coast of Guinea” while his head tilted “toward Africa.” Derek Walcott, Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 183–184. Also see Peter H. Wood, Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 42.
194. This account comes from the review by Riter Fitzgerald, “Philadelphia Item,” n.d., quoted in William Howe Downes, The Life and Works of Winslow Homer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911), 135.
195. After the initial debut in 1900, it went on view in 1902 at M. Knoedler and Co. in New York City. Winslow Homer to M. Knoedler and Co., February 17, 1902, Artists’ Letters and Manuscripts Collection, series folder 2, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Dahmann notes that the most popular of Maury’s books, as ascertained from royalties, were First Lessons, Elementary Geography, and Manual Geography. As a Confederate leader, a monument to Maury was even erected in Richmond on Monument Avenue and removed during the summer of 2020. Dahmann, Geography in America’s Schools, xxix.
196. Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Civil War and American Art (New Haven, CT: Smithsonian American Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2012), 19–23; Robert Slifkin, “Fitz Henry Lane and the Compromised Landscape, 1848–1865,” American Art 27, no. 3 (2013): 64–83. For more on maritime metaphors for national identity in nineteenth-century painting in America, see David C. Miller, “The Iconology of Wrecked or Stranded Boats in Mid to Late Nineteenth-Century American Culture,” in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 186–203.
197. Daniel Immerwahr, “Frontier, Ocean, Empire: Vistas of Expansion in Winslow Homer’s United States,” in Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents (New Haven, CT: Metropolitan Museum and Yale University Press, 2022), 20–26, 184–185.
198. Schulten, Mapping the Nation, 6; Matthew Edney, “Cartography without Progress: The Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking,” Cartographica 60 (1993): 54–68; and Jeremy W. Crampton, “Cartography’s Defining Moment: The Peters Projection Controversy, 1974–1990,” Cartographica 31 (Winter 1994): 16–32. For more on the field of critical cartography, see, e.g., Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier, “An Introduction to Critical Cartography,” ACME 4, no. 1 (2005): 11–33. For an incisive meditation on this history as it relates to mapping, see Elizabeth Alexander, The Trayvon Generation (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2022).
199. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xii.
200. See, for example, The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity, ed. Camilla Hawthorne and Jovan Scott Lewis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023).
201. Gates, Stony the Road, xvii.
202. bell hooks, “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” in Art on My Mind (New York: New Press, 1995), 57.
203. hooks, “In Our Glory,” 63, my italics.
204. One of the earliest examinations of this nexus is by Valerie Babb with a focus on both Early America and the creation of whiteness. See Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
205. See, e.g., McKittrick and Woods, “No One Knows the Mysteries,” 6; Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2001); Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Elleza Kelley, “ ‘Follow the Tree Flowers’: Fugitive Mapping in Beloved,” Antipode 53, no. 1 (2021): 181–199; Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson, Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018). As Vincent Brown argues, there is still a gulf between an increased focus on spatial and cartographic histories and the focus on Black Atlantic histories in the digital humanities. See Vincent Brown, “Mapping a Slave Revolt: Visualizing Spatial History through the Archives of Slavery,” Social Text 33, no. 4 (2015): 134–141; Moya Z. Bailey, “All of the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 1 (2011).
206. Dennis Wood has cited the distinction between mapmaking and mapping as the difference between the “gesture” and the “sketch,” the discourse and the object. See Dennis Wood, “The fine line between mapping and mapmaking,” Cartographica 30, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 50–60.
207. See Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2009).
208. At Harvard, the study of geography would later come under direct attack for reasons including “ ‘profound skepticism concerning the importance of human geography”—specifically that it was “descriptive” and “nonscientific.” The attack would lead, quite controversially, to the Geography Department being disbanded in the 1940s. See Neil Smith, “ ‘Academic War over the Field of Geography’: The Elimination of Geography at Harvard, 1947–1951,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77, no. 2 (1987): 152–172, esp. 158, 166.
209. Toni Morrison, “Preface,” in The Black Book, n.p. Morrison includes a double-page spread of the issue of the New-York (Weekly) Caucasian from January 24, 1863.
210. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 53.
211. See Brig. Gen. G. Wright to Brig. Gen. L. Thomas, “Headquarters Department of the Pacific,” San Francisco, May 26, 1863, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series One, Volume One, Part II—Correspondence, etc. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), 456–457.
212. The paper was published in New York as The Weekly Day Book from 1848 to 1861. It was renamed The New York Weekly Caucasian from 1861 to 1863 and in 1863–1868 was published as The New York Weekly Day Book Caucasian. There is also a mention of this newspaper in Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, as well as War of the Rebellion. Despite the sustained publication of this journal, this newspaper was banned from mail for US regiments, for example, during the Civil War. See The Dollar Weekly Bulletin, Maysville, KY, January 1, 1863, as one of many examples.
213. It is this method from The Black Book that I would argue, too, anticipated the focus on the pregnant silences of the archive that Morrison would argue are crucial in her 1992 seminal text Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. For more on Toni Morrison and unrecovered memory, see Paul Gilroy, “Living Memory: A Meeting with Toni Morrison,” in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), 175–182.
214. Charles A. McMurry, Special Method in Geography (New York: Macmillan, 1903), 109.
215. Sarah Schwartz, “Map: Where Critical Race Theory Is under Attack,” Education Week, June 11, 2021.
216. Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care (New York: Random House, 2022).
217. Imani Perry to Jelani Cobb, “The Man behind Critical Race Theory,” New Yorker, September 13, 2021.
218. Jennifer Schuessler, “Bans on Critical Race Theory Threaten Free Speech, Advocacy Group Says,” New York Times, November 8, 2021. The national conversation around critical race theory emerged after a 2020 Executive Order putatively aimed to “Combat Race and Sex Stereotyping.” It was later rescinded by President Biden.
219. Alex Keena, Michael Latner, Anthony J. McGann, and Charles Anthony Smith, Gerrymandering the States: Partisanship, Race, and the Transformation of American Federalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); and Nick Seabrook, One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America (New York: Pantheon, 2022).
220. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14; Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth (New York: Liveright, 2021); Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).
221. Hortense Spillers, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-date” in Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 428–470.
222. Roscoe C. Bruce, “Report of the Assistant Superintendent in Charge of Colored Schools,” Report of the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, July 1, 1915, 249–250; Givens, “Teaching to ‘Undo Their Narratively Condemned Status,’ ” 13.
223. Vanessa K. Valdés, Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017); Albert N. D. Brooks, “Organizing Negro Leadership,” NHB (May 1945): 180.
224. Givens, “Teaching to ‘Undo Their Narratively Condemned Status,’ ” 22; Tamah Richardson and Annie Rivers, “Progress of the Negro: A Unit of Work for the Third Grade,” Virginia Teachers Bulletin (May 1936): 3–8.
225. See article by regular contributor Samuel Francis, “Prospects for Racial and Cultural Survival,” American Renaissance 6 (March 1995): 1–6. Also see Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 274–282.
226. The history of Great Replacement exceeds the scope of this particular chapter, but key texts include Renaud Camus, The Great Replacement (Le grand remplacement), and J. Enoch Powell, speech, “Rivers of Blood” in 1968 in Great Britain. See Renaud Camus, Le grand remplacement (Paris: Reinharc, 2011); and J. Enoch Powell, Freedom and Reality, ed. John Wood (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1970), 213. Alexander D. Barder offers an effective summary of this history in Alexander D. Barder, “The Great Replacement: Racial War in the Twenty-First Century,” in Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 211–236. Also see Reece Jones, “Conclusion: The Great Replacement,” in Reece Jones, White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall (Boston: Beacon, 2021), 204–214; Cassie Miller, “SPLC Poll Finds Substantial Support for ‘Great Replacement’ Theory and Other Hard-Right Ideas,” Southern Poverty Law Center, June 1, 2022, https://
227. The work of “overcoming international hierarchy” in a postimperial landscape, as Adom Getachew argues, indicates the real need to blunt and dismantle the geographic language of racial dominance. Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 23.
1. Swan Marshall Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, February 1, 1913, box 5, folder 2, Kendrick-Brooks Family Papers (hereafter KBFP), Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Also see Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 3.
2. Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, July 2, 1912, page 2, box 5, folder 2, KBFP.
3. “Buried” is from Kendrick to Moyse, February 15, 1914, box 5, folder 3, KBFP; “chances for advancement” and “absolutely negligible” are from box 5, folder 8, Family Kendrick-Swan, Transcriptions, 1917–1922, KBFP.
4. Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, August 8, 1912, box 5, folder 2, KBFP.
5. Ruby Moyse to Swan M. Kendrick, Sunday, November 14, box 5, folder 1, Ruby Kendrick Correspondence, Family Kendrick-Swan, Originals, n.d., KBFP.
6. Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, October 14, 1913, box 4, folder 2, KBFP; Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, October 2, 1913, box 5, folder 2, KBFP.
7. Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, May 25, 1913, and Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby M. Kendrick, n.d., box 6, folder 1, KBFP. File placement suggests that this undated note was written before 1916.
8. Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, January 27, 1914, box 5, folder 2, KBFP.
9. Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, August 7, 1913, box 5, folder 2, KBFP. At the bottom of a letter from September 7, 1913, box 5, folder 2, KBFP a light pencil note indicates that his daughter Martha “went on with the career based upon Spanish, and his son, Webster, inherited his mathematical ability.”
10. Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, August 7, 1913, box 5, folder 2, KBFP.
11. Kendrick was offered a job at Fisk in that September 7 letter, box 5, folder 2, KBFP. Kendrick also graduated from Fisk in 1909 after attending Knoxville College and Alcorn College.
12. Quote from Ruby Moyse, letter postmarked March 17, 1917, box 5, folder 3, KBFP.
13. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
14. Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, April 22, 1913, box 5, folder 2, KBFP.
15. Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, October 2, 1913, page 3, box 5, folder 2, KBFP, from 906 T Street N.W.
16. Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, October 2, 1913, box 5, folder 2, KBFP.
17. Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, April 22, 1913, box 5, folder 2, KBFP.
18. Stephen O. Plummer to NAACP, June 10, 1915, boxes 39–25, folder 512, Archibald Grimké Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC; Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 166; Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, April 25, 1915, box 5, folder 5, KBFP.
19. Swan M. Kendrick to State War and Navy Bldg. Superintendent, May 12, 1919, box 8, folder 8, KBFP; Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby M. Kendrick, January 27, 1922, and January 1, 1922, box 6, folder 1, KBFP.
20. Art historian Michael Baxandall developed the concept of a period eye to describe the developments that came out of an evaluative culture of viewing in the commerce of art and goods in fifteenth-century Florentine Italy. The term also references the concept reframed and inflected by art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty to describe an engagement with the porous domains of bodily presentation. See Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
21. Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6, 45, 73, 107, 133.
22. While this work identifies the key shift in scale to detail that secured the transition of vision as a tactic for racial surveillance, it builds on the connection between visuality, racial science, and criminology. See Nicole R. Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64; Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
23. Mary White Ovington, “Segregation,” The Crisis 9, no. 3 (January 1915): 142.
24. Christopher L. Eisgruber, “President Eisgruber’s Message to Community on Removal of Woodrow Wilson Name from Public Policy School and Wilson College,” June 27, 2020, the Office of Communications, https://
25. Velma Davis quoted in Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, “ ‘For a Real Better Life’: Voices of African American Women Migrants, 1900–1930,” in Urban Odyssey: A Multicultural History of Washington D.C., ed. Francine Curro Cary (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 99.
26. “No Rest for the Negro,” Washington Bee, May 2, 1891, 2; Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 21.
27. Langston Hughes, “Our Wonderful Society: Washington,” Opportunity 5 (August 1927): 226.
28. Sarah Luria, Capital Speculations: Writing and Building Washington, D.C. (Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2006).
29. Civil service reformer El Bie Foltz notes that the term “clerk” denoted a much larger sphere of endeavor, from “copyists, stenographers, typewriters, transcribers, indexers, cataloguers, assistant librarians, certain kinds of attendants, translators, statisticians, section chiefs, abstracters, assistant chiefs of division, and a large number of miscellaneous employ[ee]s whose duties are of a clerical nature.” See Foltz, The Federal Civil Service: A Manual for Applicants for Positions and Those in the Civil Service of the Nation (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), 168–169.
30. Kathleen L. Wolgemuth, “Woodrow Wilson’s Appointment Policy and the Negro,” Journal of Southern History 24, no. 1 (February 1958): 467. There were four demotions or forced resignations between 1909 and 1912 in the previous Taft administration, compared to twenty-two between 1913 and 1916 in Wilson’s. See Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service.
31. This was the case with two civil servants, Arthur Gray and Thomas Dent, in the Division of Statistics in the Commerce Department. Their “promotions” left them segregated; they were to work only on statistics relevant to black living in the United States. Dent was with the only other black clerk in the division, and both were meant to work in their own room. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 127; John S. Colins to Dr. Pratt, March 11, 1915, box 332, Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, RG 40, National Archives and Records Administration; Walter White and W. T. Andrews to NAACP, August 1928, part 1: C403, Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
32. “Opportunities for Employment in Washington Departmental Service,” Civil Service Advocate, (September 1914): 1065–1066; Paul P. Van Riper, History of the United States Civil Service (Evanston, IL.: Row Peterson, 1958), 243, 251; Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 128. This data can be found in the Department of Agriculture Chief Clerk to Chiefs of Bureaus, Divisions, and Offices, July 14, 1914, entry 17, box 1, Correspondence Relating to Negroes, Records of the Department of Agriculture, General Correspondence Relating to Negroes, 1909–1955, RG 16, National Archives and Records Administration; and Lucretia Mott Kelly papers in Personnel File, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, MO.
33. “Editorial: Politics,” The Crisis 4, no. 4 (August 1912): 180–181; “Editorial: The Last Word in Politics,” The Crisis 5, no. 1 (November 1912): 29.
34. “Editorial: Politics,” The Crisis 4, no. 4 (August 1912): 181; The Crisis 5, no. 1 (November 1912): 29; “An Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson,” The Crisis 5, no. 5 (March 1913): 236–237; “Mr. Hughes” The Crisis 13, no. 1 (November 1916): 12.
35. “Probe the Riot Tragedy,” Washington Evening Star, July 29, 1919, 6; William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 14.
36. “Thirteen,” The Crisis 15, no. 3 (January 1918): 163.
37. Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 362; Lawrence Jacob Friedman, “A Nation of Savages,” in The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 150–172; April C. Armstrong, “Erased Pasts and Altered Legacies: Princeton’s First African American Students,” Princeton & Slavery Project, https://
38. Nancy J. Weiss, “The Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation,” Political Science Quarterly 84, no. 1 (March 1969): 61–79, esp. 66.
39. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 126.
40. Van Riper, History of the United States Civil Service, 238.
41. Weiss, “Negro and the New Freedom,” 71.
42. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 133.
43. Charles S. Hamlin Diary, March 9, 1914, 100, Charles Hamlin Papers (hereafter CHP), Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
44. Louis Kaplan, “Formations of American Community: Mole and Thomas’s Living Photographs,” Palais 9 (Summer 2009): 42–55.
45. Louis Kaplan, “A Patriotic Mole: A Living Photograph,” CR: The New Centennial Review 1, no. 1 (2001): 123. For more see David L. Fisk, “Arthur S. Mole: The Photographer from Zion and the Composer of the World’s First ‘Living Photographs,’ ” History of Photography Monograph series, Arizona State University, 1983, and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “The Mass Panorama,” Modernism / modernity 9, no. 2 (2002): 243–281.
46. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament (Weimar Essays), ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1976); Horst Bredekamp, “Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies” in Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Horst Bredekamp, Leviathan: Body Politic as Visual Strategy in the Work of Thomas Hobbes (Boston: De Gruyer, 2020); Allan Gabriel Cardoso dos Santos, “The Scholastic’s Dilemma: Hobbes Critique of Scholastic Politics and Papal Power on the Leviathan Frontispiece,” History of European Ideas (April 2023): 1–16; Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Mob Porn,” in Crowds, ed. Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1–45.
47. Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “The Mass Panorama,” Modernism / modernity 9, no. 2 (April 2002): 250.
48. Other photographers such as Eugene O. Goldbeck would continue Mole’s tradition of mass photographs, or “living photographs,” creating large panoramas predominantly of military units celebrating victory in World War II.
49. Mole’s photography, as a photographic panorama, could be considered an extension of the discussion of modes of assembly to telegraph the characteristics of a society. See Kracauer, The Mass Ornament.
50. See Woodrow Wilson, “An Address at the Gettysburg Battlefield,” July 4, 1913, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (hereafter PWW), ed. Arthur S. Link et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–1993), vol. 28, 23–25.
51. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6–10.
52. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self Determination and the Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 60.
53. Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 60.
54. Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 111.
55. See Wilson, “A Nonpartisan Address in Cincinnati,” October 26, 1916, PWW, vol. 38, 539.
56. Here Wilson is citing the sorts of pleas for assistance he received from citizens who came to the White House to make a case for aid to other nations. See Wilson, “Nonpartisan Address in Cincinnati,” 539.
57. Wilson had been determined to make his mark through words. He wrote to Ellen Axson, his then fiancée, “I want to contribute to our literature what no American has ever contributed.” See Woodrow Wilson to Ellen Axson, October 30, 1883, PWW, vol. 2, 501–502. This decision came about while he was a student at Princeton in 1875, after reading an article, “The Orator,” about British Prime Minister William Gladstone in an 1874 magazine. He wrote to his father about the effect it had on him. See Patrick Weil, The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023). Also see William Hale, Woodrow Wilson: The Story of His Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1912), 63–65.
58. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “My First Impressions of Woodrow Wilson,” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 4 (1973): 453. Wilson’s book The State was translated into other languages and adopted by many universities. See Woodrow Wilson: Essential Writings and Speeches of the Scholar-President, ed. Mark R. DiNunzio (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
59. Clifford is the maternal great-granduncle of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
60. As Herbert Aptheker wrote, “regrettably, neither version of A Dictionary of American Negro Biography (1983), edited by R. W. Logan and M. R. Winston list anything on Murray, who merits extended biographical notice.” Herbert Aptheker, “Introduction,” in Writings in Periodicals Edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, Selections from the Horizon, comp. and ed. Herbert Aptheker (White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1985), viii. Also see Anita Hackley-Lambert, F. H. M. Murray: First Biography of a Forgotten Pioneer for Civil Justice (Fort Washington, MD: HLE Publishing, 2006).
61. Albert Biome, “Emancipation and the Freed,” The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), esp. 156–157; Hackley-Lambert, F. H. M. Murray; Patricia Hills, “ ‘History Must Restore What Slavery Took Away’: Freeman H. M. Murray, Double Consciousness, and the Historiography of African American Art History,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History, ed. Eddie Chambers (New York: Routledge, 2019), 3–15; Richard J. Powell, “Freeman Henry Morris Murray” (Review of Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture), Art Bulletin 95, no. 4 (2013): 646–649; Steven Nelson, “Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: Race, Representation, and the Beginnings of an African American History of Art,” in Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002), 297–308; James Smalls, “Freeman Murray and the Art of Social Justice,” in Writing History from the Margins: African Americans and the Quest for Freedom, ed. Claire Parfait, Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, and Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (New York: Routledge, 2017), 131–142.
62. Clipping from The Washington Herald, February 28, 1916. In “Writings by Freeman, Organizational Affiliation, Printed Materials, 74–2,” folder: “Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture—Announcement flyer,” Freeman H. M. Murray Papers (hereafter FHMMP), Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.
63. Patricia Hills notes that Murray was interested in what was “absent,” while Nelson notes that Murray was focused on “representational silences.” See Hills, “History Must Restore,” 9; Nelson, “Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture,” 284.
64. Clipping by Murray, “The Cynic Says: Jim Crow,” n.d. in Writings by Freeman, Organizational Affiliation, Printed Materials, 74-2, Newspaper Columns, folder 27, FHMMP.
65. Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 37; Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 8.
66. Kobena Mercer, James Van Der Zee (London: Phaidon, 2003), n.p.; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Foreword,” in Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, ed. Allon Schoener (New York: New Press, 1995); Bridget R. Cooks, “Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on my Mind (1969),” American Studies 48, no. 1 (2007): 5–39; Emilie Boone, A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023).
67. Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (New York: New Press, 2007), 5; Mark Sealy, Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2019), 5; Autumn Womack, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 23.
68. Foucault declared the need for writing a “History of the Detail” in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hegel uses detail to distinguish between aesthetic conventions and periods, (i.e., Symbolism, Classicism, and Romanticism) in his Lectures on Aesthetics. Also see Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 3, 23.
69. Womack, Matter of Black Living, 8.
70. Womack, Matter of Black Living, 23.
71. Womack, Matter of Black Living, 215.
72. Hackley-Lambert, F. H. M. Murray, 174–175; Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, November 8, 1913, box 5, folder 2, KBFP; “City News in Brief,” Washington Post, November 8, 1913, 2; Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 145.
73. Hackley-Lambert, F. H. M. Murray, 174–175, 178; Francis J. Grimké, Excerpts from a Thanksgiving Sermon, Delivered November 26, 1914, and Two Letters Addressed to Hon. Woodrow Wilson, President of the U.S. (Washington, DC: R.L. Pendleton, 1914).
74. Kenneth O’Reilly, “The Jim Crow Policies of Woodrow Wilson,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 17 (Autumn 1997): 118; Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3, 502; Weiss, “Negro and the New Freedom,” 62; Josephus Daniels, The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels, 1913–1921, ed. E. David Cronon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 234, 32.
75. “Address of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, to all the Churches of Jesus Christ throughout the Earth,” adopted in Augusta, Georgia, December 1861, Hathi Trust Digital Library, https://
76. Patricia O’Toole, The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 368–369. As Erez Manela notes, Wilson’s negation of Japan’s request for a “racial equality” amendment in the League of Nations Covenant was not a straightforward example of his own racism. See Manela, “ ‘People of Many Races’: The World beyond Europe in the Wilsonian Imagination,” in Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson: the American Dilemma of Race and Democracy, ed. John Milton Cooper and Thomas Knock (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 193; Kristofer Allerfeldt, “Wilsonian Pragmatism? Woodrow Wilson, Japanese Immigration, and the Paris Peace Conference,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 15 (September 2004): 545–572; Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race, and Equity: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge, 2009).
77. To my knowledge, a significant exception here, though it is not a biography, is Manela’s scholarship in “People of Many Races.”
78. Arthur S. Link quoted by the journal’s editors in O’Reilly, “The Jim Crow Policies of Woodrow Wilson,” 120.
79. Woodrow Wilson, “The Reconstruction of the Southern States,” Atlantic Monthly (January 1901): 11; Woodrow Wilson, History of the American People, vol. 5 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902), 46–52.
80. Wilson, “Reconstruction,” 6.
81. Manela notes Wilson’s use of oblique language in the context of his international discussions, using terms such as “enlightened” and “modern” as proxy, and in his discussions on the military invasion of Haiti where he never mentions race. See Manela, “People of Many Races,” 187–188, 200.
82. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, vol. 3 (New York: Bedminster, 1968), 973–974.
83. Woodrow Wilson, “The Study of Administration,” Political Science Quarterly 2 (July 1887): 197–222, esp. 162.
84. R. R. Thompson to Alain Locke, July 15, 1917, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC. See Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 289.
85. “Mr. Trotter and Mr. Wilson” (A conversation between William Monroe Trotter and Woodrow Wilson), The Crisis 9, no. 3 (January 1915): 119.
86. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 162.
87. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 164–165.
88. Woodrow Wilson to Ellen Axson, October 30, 1883, PWW, vol. 2, 501–502.
89. Ray Stannard Baker Diary, entry for March 32, 1919, PWW, vol. 56, 491. Wilson’s professorial habits while governing in the White House are well documented, but his own comments offer the most color. He told Democratic senator Henry Ashurst of Arizona, in a tense moment in negotiations with the German government over their agreement to the Fourteen Points, “I am willing if I can serve the country to go into a cellar and read poetry the remainder of my life.” Henry F. Ashurst diary, entry for October 14, 1918, PWW, vol. 51, 339–340.
90. Wilson, “Study of Administration,” 203. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 162.
91. Wilson, “Study of Administration,” 198, 217.
92. Wilson, “Study of Administration,” 210, italics are Wilson’s.
93. Wilson, “Study of Administration,” 202, 204, 209–210.
94. Wilson, “Study of Administration,” 206–207.
95. The closest I have seen a scholar come is Benjamin Slomski, who does not analyze that text but is among the scholars who suggests that “Darwinian arguments were present” in Wilson’s administrative policy. Slomski writes, “It is possible that Wilson’s administrative thought is unrelated to his racism, but it is also possible that Wilson understood his administrative theory and his racism to be part of an organic whole.” See Benjamin Slomski, “Darwin and American Public Administration: Woodrow Wilson’s Darwinian Argument for Administration,” Politics and Life Sciences 41, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 105–113, quotation on 109.
96. See Woodrow Wilson, “The Study of Politics,” in An Old Master and Other Political Essays (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1893), 55.
97. Wilson, “The Study of Politics,” 53–54.
98. Wilson, “The Study of Politics,” 56.
99. Woodrow Wilson: Essential Writings and Speeches of the Scholar-President, ed. Mario R. DiNunzio (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 7–8.
100. Joseph R. Wilson to Woodrow Wilson, December 22, 1879, PWW, vol. 1, 589. For more on Wilson’s personal relationships, Patrick Weil argues that the psychobiography of Wilson, co-authored by William C. Bullitt and Sigmund Freud, warrants more careful analysis than the dismissals it initially received when published in 1966; see Weil, Madman in the White House. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Viking Adult, 2014), 335. This use of the term “mere literature” has come up in art historical scholarship in the context of modernism in the early twentieth century, without reference to this political context, so divorced is the study of the history of segregation from the study of visual culture of the period. See Lauren Kroiz’s discussion of Alfred Stieglitz’s break from American realism by calling its painting “mere literature.” Lauren Kroiz, Composite Modernism: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 4; Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York: Aperture, 1990), 67.
101. Woodrow Wilson, Mere Literature and Other Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 18; “President Woodrow Wilson of Princeton,” The World’s Work 19, no. 6 (April 1910): 12762–12763. Wilson was not alone in his focus on this term the “constructive imagination.” In 1903, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot featured the term in his well-attended Presidential Address of the National Education Association in Boston, defining it as one of the four characteristics of the “New Definition of the Cultivated Man.” Eliot saw the fourth and final skill of the “cultivated man” as the “training of the constructive imagination,” which “implies the creation or building of a new thing.” He likened this to the work of a sculptor and painter, but also to those working in the realm “of science, the investigator” placing Darwin, Pasteur, Dante, and Shakespeare in the same breath. The usage pattern of the term “constructive imagination,” using the American History Newspapers Database, shows that it appears between 1850 and 1919 in the United States, peaks in use between 1910 and 1919, then declines in 1920, slipping out of usage altogether by the middle of the twentieth century. The term is commonly used to describe the creative faculty of mind. See examples, including, “The Limitation of the Constructive Imagination,” Daily Picayune, October 5, 1890, 12; and “Reminiscences of Prof. Tyndall. Herbert Spencer’s Analysis of the Life and Character and Achievements of hist Friends,” St. Louis Republic, November 2, 1894, 32.
102. Review of Mere Literature (author unknown), New York Times, January 9, 1897; PWW, vol. 10, 99–101.
103. Wilson, “Address on the Nature of History,” PWW, vol. 15, 476, 485.
104. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin, 2019), xx.
105. Jennifer Raab, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 7, 84–85; “Cotopaxi,” Harper’s Weekly 7 (April 4, 1863): 210.
106. Raab, Frederic Church, 2, 5.
107. Raab, Frederic Church, 19; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007), 16–17.
108. Joseph Ruggles Wilson to Wilson, PWW, vol. 8, 276.
109. Ellen Axson had gone to study in New York City at the Art Students League when George de Forest Brush and Thomas Eakins were teaching, right after her engagement to Wilson, which frustrated him. He would pursue his graduate work in political science at Johns Hopkins. Ellen Axson Wilson, Kevin Grogan, Cary Wilkins, Amy Kurtz Lansing, and Erick Montgomery, First Lady Ellen Axson and Her Circle (Augusta, GA: Morris Museum of Art, 2013), ix.
110. Wilson to Ellen Axson, December 22, 1883, PWW, vol. 2, 597; and Wilson to Ellen Axon, July 16, 1883, PWW, vol. 2, 389.
111. Ellen Axson to Wilson, February 10, 1885, PWW, vol. 4, 234; and Ellen Axson to Wilson, December 11, 1884, PWW, vol. 3, 533.
112. Wilson to Ellen Axson, December 12, 1884, PWW, vol. 3, 534–535.
113. James T. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917–1919 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939), vii–ix, 4, 7, 16, 62, 74, 166.
114. Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 12–13.
115. Charles S. Hamlin Diary, March 12, 1914, 108, CHP.
116. Charles S. Hamlin Diary, March 13, 1914, 108, CHP.
117. Charles S. Hamlin Diary, March 13, 1914, 108, CHP.
118. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 121.
119. Charles S. Hamlin Diary, March 16, 1914, 110, CHP.
120. Womack, Matter of Black Living, 12–13; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), esp. chapter 1, “Saving the Nation: The Racial Data Revolution and the Negro Problem.”
121. Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 19–20.
122. Charles S. Hamlin Diary, March 9, 1914, 100, CHP.
123. J. E. Ralph to Charles Hamlin, included in Charles S. Hamlin Diary, March 7, 1914, 99, CHP. Also see Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 120.
124. Charles S. Hamlin Diary, November 9, 1913, 95, CHP.
125. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 120.
126. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 121.
127. Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Washington, DC: Ransdell, 1940), 297–298. In 1953, Terrell began the process of desegregating the nation’s capital, and at the end of her life, she helped lead a case that went to the Supreme Court. The case focused on Thompson’s Restaurant, which had refused to serve the committee she chaired, the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of District of Columbia Anti-Discrimination Laws (19).
128. Terrell, Colored Woman, 298.
129. Edward Christopher Williams, When Washington Was in Vogue: A Lost Novel of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Amistad, 2003), 48. Also see “Threat to Use Vitriol,” Washington Evening Star, February 4, 1915, 14.
130. Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, October 22, 1913, box 5, folder 2, KBFP.
131. Charles S. Hamlin to Archibald Grimké, June 16, 1914, box 39–25, folder 499, Archibald Grimké Collection (AGC), Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.
132. US Congress, House Select Committee on Reform in the Civil Service, Hearing on Segregation of Clerks and Employees in the Civil Service, 63rd Congress, 2nd Session, March 6, 1914 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914), 20–21; Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 156.
133. “The Correspondents’ Club: Statement of Principles,” Kendrick, Swan M., General Correspondence, 1908–1909, 1915–1918, box 8, folder 1, KBFP.
134. Kendrick to The Red Cross Magazine, Garden City, NY, January 22, 1919, box 8, folder 1, KBFP.
135. Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 301.
136. Swan Marshall Kendrick to Samuel G. Blythe, February 23, 1919, box 8, folder 2, KBFP.
137. Kendrick to M.A. Donahue & Co., November 24, 1919, box 8, folder 2, KBFP.
138. M. A. Donohue & Co. to S. M. Kendrick, December 22, 1919, box 8, folder 2, KBFP.
139. Kendrick to Mr. R. P. Andrews, Washington, DC, January 17, 1917, box 8, folder 1, KBFP.
140. Kendrick to Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, July 10, 1916, box 8, folder 1, KBFP.
141. Kendrick to Harrison Rhodes, c/o The Metropolitan Magazine, October 10, 1918, box 8, folder 1, KBFP.
142. Chad L. Williams, The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023), 125–127, 173; L. Linard, “Au sujet des tropues noires américaines,” August 7, 1918, 17N 76, Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, Château de Vincennes, Paris; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Editing the Crisis,” The Crisis 58, no. 3 (March 1951): 149.
143. Du Bois, “Documents of the War,” The Crisis 18, no. 1 (May 1919): 21; Williams, Wounded World, 173.
144. Lorraine Boissoneault, “What Will Happen to Stone Mountain, America’s Largest Confederate Memorial,” Smithsonian.com, August 22, 2017, https://
145. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Blow-Up: Photographic Projection, Dynamite, and the Sculpting of American Mountains,” in Scale, ed. Jennifer Roberts (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2016), 66–102; David Freeman, Carved in Stone: The History of Stone Mountain (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 62; Grace Elizabeth Hale, “Granite Stopped Time: Stone Mountain Memorial and the Representation of Southern Identity,” in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, ed. Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2019), 219–233. See also Grace Elizabeth Hale, “Granite Stopped Time: The Stone Mountain Memorial and the Representation of White Southern Identity,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 82, no. 1 (1998): 22–44, http://
146. Joseph Biden, Commencement Speech, Howard University, May 13, 2023. https://
147. According to research by the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are nearly five hundred symbols that honor Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson in the United States, and most were not installed immediately after the Civil War but during segregation. See “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” Southern Poverty Law Center, February 1, 2019, https://
148. Robert Musil put it this way, “What strikes one most about monuments is that one doesn’t notice them. There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments.” See Robert Musil, “Monuments,” trans. Burton Pike, in Selected Writings, ed. Burton Pike (New York: Continuum, 1986), 320. For a brilliant analysis of this essay and its implications on contemporary interpretations of monuments, see Joseph Koerner, “On Monuments,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 67 / 68 (2016–2017): 5–20; Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” trans. Kurt S. Forster and Diane Ghirlardo, Oppositions 25 (1982): 21–50; Michelle Lamprakos, “Riegl’s ‘Modern Cult of Monuments’ and the Problem of Value,” Change over Time 4, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 418–435.
149. Freeman Henry Morris Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation (Washington, DC: Press of Murray Brothers, 1916), 177.
150. Hackley-Lambert, F. H. M. Murray, 165. Freeman Henry Morris Murray to The Macmillan Company, February 15, 1915, in “Emancipation … Correspondence, G-Z,” June 25, 1915, FHMMP. The manuscript began as part of his lecture series in 1913 at the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Summer School and the Chautauqua National Religious Training School at Durham, North Carolina in 1913 and in writings for the AME Church Review. Anita Hackley-Lambert notes that book began as early as 1904 with his studies of black art. Hackley-Lambert, F. H. M. Murray, 189.
151. Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 156; “Confers on Cuts in Photo Play Films,” Boston Daily Globe, April 13, 1915; “Progress of Negro Race,” Boston Daily Globe, April 15, 1915; “Will Improve Big Picture,” Boston Evening Record, April 15, 1915, microfilm reel 2, D. W. Griffith Papers, 1897–1954 (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1982); “Will Add New Film to ‘The Birth of a Nation,” Boston Herald, April 15, 1915, Griffith Papers; “ ‘Birth of a Nation’ to Have New Film,” Traveler and Evening Herald, April 15, 1915, Griffith Papers.
152. Field, Uplift Cinema, 171–172.
153. Field, Uplift Cinema, 174; “Ohio’s Censors Ban Photo Play,” New York Age, October 7, 1915.
154. Field, Uplift Cinema, 174; Leslie Pinckney Hill to Mr. Emlen, Pennsylvania Armstrong Association, September 23, 1915, Hampton University Archives, Hampton University Museum. Hampton, Virginia (hereafter Hampton Archives).
155. Field, Uplift Cinema, 159.
156. Field, Uplift Cinema, 174.
157. Field, Uplift Cinema, 174.
158. The first antilynching bill in Congress was H.R. 6963, A Bill for the Protection of All Citizens of the United States against Mob Violence, and the Penalty for Breaking Such Laws. It was introduced on January 20, 1900, by Representative George Henry White of North Carolina.
159. Richard J. Powell, Black Art: A Cultural History, 3rd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2021), 16.
160. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed, 2, xx.
161. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed, 45.
162. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed, xx.
163. Draft of a lecture, box 1, folder 5, FHMMP.
164. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed, xx.
165. Alfred A. Moss Jr., The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 119, 209.
166. Murray to the Librarian, The Public Library, New London, Connecticut, May 15, 1916, “Emancipation and the Freed … Correspondence, G-Z,” FHMMP.
167. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed, 92–101.
168. Their correspondence shows a respectful but frank exchange as Murray often wrote to Du Bois asking for more attention to the meaning of particular words. As one of many examples, when editing one of Du Bois’s essays for The Horizon, Murray had taken issue with the use of the word “business.” He said, “I do not wish to be hypocritical, but I do not like the word ‘business,’ ” and asked Du Bois to make it plain. “If ‘business done,’ … means money actually taken in. Why not say the latter, in so many words?” F. H. M. Murray to W. E. B. Du Bois [fragment], 1907, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
169. Hills, “ ‘History Must Restore What Slavery Took Away,’ ” 3–15; Early draft of the Preface, not dated, box 2, folder 1, FHMMP.
170. See Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert, “Introduction,” to “W. E. B. Du Bois: The Princess Steel” in Little Known Documents: Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America 130, no. 3 (2015): 819–829.
171. Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, ed. Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018), 22.
172. Beyond the scholarship already cited regarding Du Bois’s design, please note the exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, Deconstructing Power: W. E. B. Du Bois at the 1900 World’s Fair, 2022–2023, curated by Devon Zimmerman, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, in consultation with Lanisa Kitchiner, chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress, and with support from Yao-Fen You, senior curator and head of product design and decorative arts at Cooper Hewitt, and Christina De Léon, associate curator of Latino Design at Cooper Hewitt.
173. Hills, “ ‘History Must Restore What Slavery Took Away,’ ” 6. See exchange with former Atlanta University president Dr. Horace Bumstead. The falling out with Du Bois was over Murray’s son’s management of The Horizon and later Murray’s attacks on the NAACP through a jeremiad in The Guardian. Du Bois to F. Morris Murray, November 1, 1910, Hackley-Lambert Family Papers, cited in Hackley-Lambert, F. H. M. Murray, 163–165.
174. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Numerical Listing of Books in Du Bois’s Library, 1952, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, https://credo.library.umass.edu/cgi-bin/pdf.cgi?id=scua:mums312-b239-i003.
175. “Leaders of Negro Race to Meet Here: Writers and Scholars of American Academy to Gather this Month,” Evening Star (Washington, DC), December 16, 1923. The listing indicates that that the following officers of the academy would be present: Arthur A. Schomburg, Brooklyn, NY; vice presidents J. R. Clifford, Charles D. Martin, L. Z. Johnson, Joseph J. France; recording secretary Thomas M. Dent; librarian T. Montgomery Gregory; treasurer Lafayette M. Hershaw; executive committee members John W. Cromwell, Kelly Miller, Alain LeRoy Locke, F. H. M. Murray, and John E. Bruce, and corresponding secretary Robert A. Pelham, Washington, DC.
176. Moss, American Negro Academy, 121.
177. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Art and Art Galleries of Modern Europe,” ca. 1895, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, https://
178. Stewart, New Negro, 396.
179. Richard J. Powell, “Review of Freeman Henry Morris Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture,” Art Bulletin 95, no. 4 (December 2013): 646–649; Smalls, “Freeman Murray,” 132. Murray’s work had inspired, as Smalls also notes, seminal books including James A. Porter’s Modern Negro Art (1937) and Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves. As Powell notes, the digital life of Murray’s Emancipation and the Freed nearly a century after it had long been out of print is thanks to the work of art historian Albert Boime (1933–2008).
180. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 216, 227.
181. Hackley-Lambert, F. H. M. Murray, 222.
182. Ifill, On the Courthouse Lawn; also see the Bryan Stevenson–founded Equal Justice Initiative publication Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, https://
183. “John Hartfield Will Be Lynched by Ellisville Mob at 5 O’Clock This Afternoon,” New Orleans States, June 26, 1919.
184. It is important to note that these lynchings were a nodal point for the formation of racial identity for white citizens. See David Marriott, On Black Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
185. C. Porter to P. G. Cooper, March 13, 1919, Federal Surveillance of African Americans. See Robert Whitaker, On the Laps of the Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation (New York: Crown, 2008), 38.
186. Committee of the Negro Silent Protest Parade, “Petition re: Lynching: To the President and Congress of the United States,” typeset carbon, signed and printed version, July 28, 1917, James Weldon Johnson and Grace Nail Johnson Papers (JWJ MSS 49), Series II: Writings, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, https://
187. Jacqueline Goldsby describes the visual rule by which lynching was represented to and known by the broader American public. See Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); also see Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women and the Mob (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Ken Gonzalez-Day, Lynching in the West, 1850–1935 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Leigh Raiford, “The Consumption of Lynching Images,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Walls (New York: International Center of Photography and Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 266–273; Shawn Michelle Smith and Dora Apel, Lynching Photographs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
188. Syreeta McFadden, “What Do You Do After Surviving Your Own Lynching?” Buzzfeed News, June 23, 2016, https://
189. Kerry James Marshall, Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, video interview: https://
190. US Congress, House Select Committee on Reform in the Civil Service, Hearing on Segregation of Clerks and Employees in the Civil Service, 63rd Cong., 2nd sess., 20–21.
191. The story of Parks’s first days recounted here is from Gordon Parks, A Choice of Weapons (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986), 222–223.
192. Parks, Choice of Weapons, 223.
193. Parks quoted in Martin H. Bush, “A Conversation with Gordon Parks,” in Bush, The Photographs of Gordon Parks (Wichita, KS: Wichita State University, 1983).
194. Deborah Willis, “Ella Watson: The Empowered Woman of Gordon Parks’ American Gothic,” New York Times, May 14, 2018.
195. LaToya Ruby Frazier quoted in A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks, HBO Documentary (November 10, 2021).
196. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 67. This too is part of the dynamic of, as Syliva Wynter puts it, “redefining White America as simply America.” See Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 57. The slippage between race and nation began with Immanuel Kant, who defined race as one category of “human variety” in his 1775 essay “On the Different Races of Mankind,” yet often the word “nation” was used instead of “race” as David Bindman points out in Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (London: Reaktion, 2002), 16. I have written about this image in “America’s Destiny in Pictures,” Aperture blog, March 7, 2017, http://
197. Charlotte Swan Kendrick Brooks, Joseph Kendrick Brooks, and Walter Henderson Brooks, The Kendrick Kin: An African American Family Saga (Washington, DC: Brooks Associates, Charlotte K. Brooks, 1993).
198. Brooks, Brooks, and Brooks, Kendrick Kin.
1. Evie Terrono, “ ‘Great Generals and Christian Soldiers’: Commemorations of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Civil Rights Era,” in The Civil War in Art and Memory, ed. Kirk Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 147–170; “The Proposed Memorial to General Robert Edward Lee in the Washington Cathedral,” Virginian Magazine of History and Biography 57, no. 3 (July 1949): 301–306; Vylla Poe Wilson, “U.D.C. Given ‘Go Light’ on Lee Memorial,” Washington Times Herald, November 29, 1947; G. Gardner Monks to Elizabeth B. Bashinsky, December 13, 1951, stained glass, Lee-Jackson Bay folder, Washington National Cathedral Archives.