In 1853, Eyre Crowe, a young British artist, visited a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia. Harrowed by what he witnessed, he captured the scene in sketches that he would later develop into a series of illustrations and paintings, including the culminating painting, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia. This innovative book uses Crowe’s paintings to explore the texture of the slave trade in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans, the evolving iconography of abolitionist art, and the role of visual culture in the transatlantic world of abolitionism. Tracing Crowe’s trajectory from Richmond across the American South and back to London—where his paintings were exhibited just a few weeks after the start of the Civil War—Maurie D. McInnis illuminates not only how his abolitionist art was inspired and made, but also how it influenced the international public’s grasp of slavery in America. With almost 140 illustrations, Slaves Waiting for Sale brings a fresh perspective to the American slave trade and abolitionism as we enter the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

In 1853, Eyre Crowe, a young British artist, visited a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia. Harrowed by what he witnessed, he captured the scene in sketches that he would later develop into a series of illustrations and paintings, including the culminating painting, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia. This innovative book uses Crowe’s paintings to explore the texture of the slave trade in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans, the evolving iconography of abolitionist art, and the role of visual culture in the transatlantic world of abolitionism. Tracing Crowe’s trajectory from Richmond across the American South and back to London—where his paintings were exhibited just a few weeks after the start of the Civil War—Maurie D. McInnis illuminates not only how his abolitionist art was inspired and made, but also how it influenced the international public’s grasp of slavery in America. With almost 140 illustrations, Slaves Waiting for Sale brings a fresh perspective to the American slave trade and abolitionism as we enter the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

In Black Bodies, White Gold Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In doing so, Arabindan-Kesson models an art historical approach that makes the histories of the Black diaspora central to nineteenth-century cultural production. She traces the emergence of a speculative vision that informs perceptions of Blackness in which artistic renderings of cotton—as both commodity and material—became inexorably tied to the monetary value of Black bodies. From the production and representation of “negro cloth”—the textile worn by enslaved plantation workers—to depictions of Black sharecroppers in photographs and paintings, Arabindan-Kesson demonstrates that visuality was the mechanism through which Blackness and cotton became equated as resources for extraction. In addition to interrogating the work of nineteenth-century artists, she engages with contemporary artists such as Hank Willis Thomas, Lubaina Himid, and Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, who contend with the commercial and imperial processes shaping constructions of Blackness and meanings of labor.

"The sweeping vantages that typify American landscape painting from the nineteenth century by Thomas Cole and other members of the Hudson School are often interpreted for their geopolitical connotations, as visual attempts to tame the wild, alleviating fears of a savage frontier through views that subdue the landscape to the eye. Zachary Tavlin's "Glancing Visions" challenges the long-standing assumption that visuality in nineteenth-century art and literature was inherently imperialistic or possessive. While there is much to be said for both material, economic, and theological impulses to clear the wilderness, superimpose a national identity, and usher in a Puritanical idyll, many literary figures of the era display a purposeful disdain for the "possessive gaze," signaling instead a preference for subtle glances, often informed by early photography, Impressionism, new techniques in portraiture, and, soon after, the dawn of cinema. The visual subjectivities and contingencies introduced by these media made room for a visual counter-narrative, one informed by a mode of seeing that moves fast and lightly across the surface of things. Tavlin probes Nathaniel Hawthorne's idea of the imagination, one that derives from both the camera obscura (in "The Custom House") and the daguerreotype (in The House of the Seven Gables), each in its way an instance of the "glance" and entirely dependent on temporal moments. The poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper toggles between gazes and glances, unsettling two competing forms of racialized seeing as they pertain to nineteenth-century Black life and racial hierarchies--the sentimental gaze and the slave trader's glance--highlighting the life-and-death stakes of both looking anyone squarely in the eye and looking away. Emily Dickinson's "certain slant of light," syntactical oddities, and her stitching of scraps and fragments into the fascicles that constitute her corpus all derive from a commitment to contingency, "the ungrounded life's only defense against the abyss of non-being." Tavlin investigates, as well, Henry James's vexed but entirely dependent relationship to literary and painterly impressionism, and William Carlos Williams's imagist poetics as a response to early cinema's use of the cut as the basis for a new visual grammar. Each of these literary artists, Tavlin argues--via their own distinctive sensibilities and the artistic or technological counterparts that informed them-refuse the authoritative, all-possessive gaze in favor of the glance, a mode of seeing, thinking, and being that made way for what we now think of as commonplace, namely modernity"--

This is part of a three document series. All with the same title and similar content. “Slide Show with Notes:” Which is this version, can be read as a stand alone, or as a reference for an educator projecting just the slide images for lecture, discussion and teaching. Parents may choose to read along with their children while explaining illustrations. The “Slide Show” version is for projecting just the slides from a PDF. Divided into Chapters (blocks of learning). The images are uniquely useful in stimulating further research and for enhancing visual learning. The “Document” is the original illustrated narrative version available as a stand-alone document. It is the unabridged version having more details than the Slide Show with Notes. Woven into this presentation about Slavery is the significance of the ideas and ideals set forth in our founding documents that establish the purpose of how we live together in our nation. Also, included are sections on the principles of character. known and unknown heroes that helped end slavery, and the symbolism of our flag that represents "Freedom, Dignity and True Meaning of being an American." The two slide show versions were born with a question posed by Karen Hughes White, a founder of the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier, after reading the original document, she asked if I could give a talk about the subject, I said yes, I have experience and I use slides – which I had not thought of producing. All three versions are available for free on Google Books. Hope they are helpful.

How did witnesses of slavery relate their experiences and what effect did their reports have? This book examines travel accounts, fictions, poetry, and legal texts to analyze direct and indirect encounters with slavery in the antebellum United States. It discusses the rhetorical politics of British and American, and black and white, observations of slavery. The discussion raises critical questions about the role of witness and its link with political action, both in antebellum and contemporary America.

"A long-overdue study of the depiction of slavery in nineteenth-century American art and visual culture, Hidden in Plain Sight investigates the relationship between proslavery politics and the visual record. By examining a vast array of Civil War-era artworks that champion the institution of enslavement and connecting them with the abolitionist materials to which they respond, Rachel Stephens traces themes of concealment and silence through paintings, photographs, and ephemera and explores how the visual canon of high art was used to cover up, control, and reshape the discourse surrounding the United States' most odious institution"--