White Captives offers a new perspective of Indian-white coexistence on the American frontier through analysis of historical, anthropological, political, and literary materials. --> Namias shows that visual, literary, and historical accounts of the capture of Euro-Americans by Indians are commentaries on the uncertain boundaries of gender, race, and culture during the colonial Indian Wars, the American Revolution, and the Civil War. She compares the experiences and representations of male and female captives over time and on successive frontiers and examines the narratives of captives Jane McCrea, Mary Jemison, and Sarah Wakefield.

This project is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton penned the Declaration of Sentiments for the first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, she unleashed a powerful force in American society. In A Sisterhood of Sculptors, Melissa Dabakis outlines the conditions under which a group of American women artists adopted this egalitarian view of society and negotiated the gendered terrain of artistic production at home and abroad. Between 1850 and 1876, a community of talented women sought creative refuge in Rome and developed successful professional careers as sculptors. Some of these women have become well known in art-historical circles: Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, Anne Whitney, and Vinnie Ream. The reputations of others have remained, until now, buried in the historical record: Emma Stebbins, Margaret Foley, Sarah Fisher Ames, and Louisa Lander. At midcentury, they were among the first women artists to attain professional stature in the American art world while achieving international fame in Rome, London, and other cosmopolitan European cities. In their invention of modern womanhood, they served as models for a younger generation of women who adopted artistic careers in unprecedented numbers in the years following the Civil War. At its core, A Sisterhood of Sculptors is concerned with the gendered nature of creativity and expatriation. Taking guidance from feminist theory, cultural geography, and expatriate and postcolonial studies, Dabakis provides a detailed investigation of the historical phenomenon of women’s artistic lives in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century. As an interdisciplinary examination of femininity and creativity, it provides models for viewing and interpreting nineteenth-century sculpture and for analyzing the gendered status of the artistic profession.

Nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture was a highly politicized international movement. Based in Rome, many expatriate American sculptors created works that represented black female subjects in compelling and problematic ways. Rejecting pigment as dangerous and sensual, adherence to white marble abandoned the racialization of the black body by skin color. In The Color of Stone, Charmaine A. Nelson brilliantly analyzes a key, but often neglected, aspect of neoclassical sculpture--color. Considering three major works--Hiram Powers's Greek Slave, William Wetmore Story's Cleopatra, and Edmonia Lewis's Death of Cleopatra--she explores the intersection of race, sex, and class to reveal the meanings each work holds in terms of colonial histories of visual representation as well as issues of artistic production, identity, and subjectivity. She also juxtaposes these sculptures with other types of art to scrutinize prevalent racial discourses and to examine how the black female subject was made visible in high art. By establishing the centrality of race within the discussion of neoclassical sculpture, Nelson provides a model for a black feminist art history that at once questions and destabilizes canonical texts. Charmaine A. Nelson is assistant professor of art history at McGill University.

When 19th century Americans looked at a statue of a nude woman in chains, or a shipwrecked mother and child, what did they see? The author argues that there was a connection between the popularity of artworks such as these, which derive from a sentimental literary culture, and the rapidly changing social, economic, and political environment that was beginning to raise questions about women's nature and role in society. By exploring the once-popular genre of ideal sculpture, with its focus on female subjects and its insistence on narrative content, Kasson is able to shed light on conventional assumptions about gender roles, as well as the tensions that lay behind these beliefs.

Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century is the first book to investigate women artists working in disparate parts of the world. This major new book offers a dazzling array of compelling essays on art, architecture and design by leading writers: Joan Kerr on art in Australia by residents, migrants and visitors; Ka Bo Tsang on the imperial court in China; Gayatri Sinha on south Asian artists; Mary Roberts on harem portraiture of the Ottoman empire; Griselda Pollock on Parisian studios; Lynne Walker on women patron-builders in Britain; S?shy;ghle Bhreathnach-Lynch and Julie Anne Stevens on Irish women artists; Ruth Phillips on souvenir art by native and settler women; Janet Berlo on North American textiles; Kristina Huneault on white settler identity in Canada; Charmaine Nelson on neo-classical sculpture in North America; and Stacie Widdifield on Mexico. This pioneering collection addresses issues at the heart of feminist and post-colonial studies: the nature of difference, discrepant modernities and cross-cultural encounters. Written in a lively and accessible style, this lavishly illustrated volume offers fresh perspectives on women, art and identity. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of women artists and the art of the nineteenth century.