This book presents both nationally significant objects and ordinary items from everyday life to provide insight into 19th century American society, showing readers how the production, design, function, and use of these objects can inform our understanding of the period. Artifacts from 19th Century America examines a broad array of objects representing various aspects of 19th century American society. The objects have been chosen to illuminate daily life in a number of categories including cooking, entertainment, grooming, clothing and accessories, health, household items, religious life, work, and education. The book's 53 entries include a brief introduction to the background of the object, when and why it was made, and who used it, followed by a detailed description of the object itself. Finally, each entry provides a deep dive into the object's significance and how the object reveals clues about the social, political, economic, and intellectual life of the society in which it was produced and utilized. Students and general readers alike will not only learn about the time period but also learn to use the skills of material culture theory and method, including how to draw meaningful conclusions from each object about their historical context and significance.

Nineteenth-century Victorian-era mourning rituals--long and elaborate public funerals, the wearing of lavishly somber mourning clothes, and families posing for portraits with deceased loved ones--are often depicted as bizarre or scary. But behind many such customs were rational or spiritual meanings. This book offers an in-depth explanation at how death affected American society and the creative ways in which people responded to it. The author discusses such topics as mediums as performance artists and postmortem painters and photographers, and draws a connection between death and the emergence of three-dimensional media.

"A collection of essays presenting international perspectives on the narratives and the practices grounding the scholarly study of American Art"--Provided by publisher.

Explore the rich history and influence of Christian art from Antiquity to the present day. Michelle Brown traces the rich history of Christian art, crossing boundaries to explore how art has reflected and stimulated a response to the teachings of Christ, and to Christian thought and experience across the ages. Embracing much of the history of art in the West and parts of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australasia, Michelle considers art of the earliest Christians to the modern day. Featuring articles by invited contributors on subjects including Icons; Renaissance Florence; Rubens and the Counter-Reformation; Religious Folk Art; Jewish Artists; Christian Themes; Making the St John’s Bible, and Christianity and Contemporary Art in North America, Christian Art is an ideal survey of the subject for all those interested in the world’s artistic heritage. •⊂ Comprehensive and authoritative text from the Early Christian period to the modern day •⊂ Wide international coverage •⊂ Feature articles on special subjects by a team of experts from around the world

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, star of the American West, began his journey to fame at age twenty-three, when he met writer Ned Buntline. The pulp novels Buntline later penned were loosely based on Cody’s scouting and bison-hunting adventures and sparked a national sensation. Other writers picked up the living legend of “Buffalo Bill” for their own pulp novels, and in 1872 Buntline produced a theatrical show starring Cody himself. In 1883, Cody opened his own show, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which ultimately became the foundation for the world’s image of the American frontier. After the Civil War, new transcontinental railroads aided rapid westward expansion, fostering Americans’ long-held fascination with their western frontier. The railroads enabled traveling shows to move farther and faster, and improved printing technologies allowed those shows to print in large sizes and quantities lively color posters and advertisements. Cody’s show team partnered with printers, lithographers, photographers, and iconic western American artists, such as Frederic Remington and Charles Schreyvogel, to create posters and advertisements for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Circuses and other shows used similar techniques, but Cody’s team perfected them, creating unique posters that branded Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as the true Wild West experience. They helped attract patrons from across the nation and ultimately from around the world at every stop the traveling show made. In Art and Advertising in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Michelle Delaney showcases these numerous posters in full color, many of which have never before been reproduced, pairing them with new research into previously inaccessible manuscript and photograph collections. Her study also includes Cody’s correspondence with his staff, revealing the showman’s friendships with notable American and European artists and his show’s complex, modern publicity model. Beautifully designed, Art and Advertising in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West presents a new perspective on the art, innovation, and advertising acumen that created the international frontier experience of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

Provides a wide-ranging entry point and intervention into scholarship on nineteenth-century American letter-writingThis comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field-the history of letters and letter writing-is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.Key FeaturesDraws together different emphases on the intellectual, literary and social uses of letter writing Provides students and researchers with a means to situate letters in their wider theoretical and historical contextsMethodologically expansive, intellectually interrogative chapters based on original research by leading academicsOffers new insights into the lives and careers of Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edgar Allan Poe, among many others

This book illustrates and discusses 300 prime objects displayed in the 1970 exhibition of American decorative arts displayed during the Centennial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970. Presented as a series of lavish room settings and galleries, the exhibit included pieces in the 19th century’s principal styles of furniture and decorative arts--Federal, Empire, Gothic, rococo, Renaissance, art nouveau, and reform. Objects featured in this book include various pieces of furniture, silver, glass, ceramics, and metalwork from the Museum’s American wing.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

"From the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries a sweeping movement in architectural and decorative taste dominated Western cultures. Known collectively by the descriptive term "Revival Styles," this phenomenon, which left a rich visual legacy upon the cultural landscapes of many nations, exhibited three primary manifestations: Classical (chiefly Greek and Roman), Gothic (or Medieval), and Egyptian (or Near Eastern). In America, for a variety of reasons, a significantly large amount of the creative energy inherent in the Revival movement was directed towards the conception and erection of spectacular monuments and memorials to prominent Americans. Frequently designed and executed by the leading architects and sculptors of the day, the great majority of these strikingly beautiful artifacts and structures were placed in the large "rural" cemeteries of American cities developed in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, where they remain for future generations to analyze and admire. In this richly illustrated volume, art historian Peggy McDowell and folklorist Richard E. Meyer blend their respective disciplinary perspectives, along with their shared long-standing fascination with cemeteries and funerary material culture, to provide a thoroughgoing descriptive analysis of this dramatic chapter in the history of American memorial art."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A rich exploration of American artworks that reframes them within current debates on race, gender, the environment, and more Object Lessons in American Art explores a diverse gathering of Euro-American, Native American, and African American art from a range of contemporary perspectives, illustrating how innovative analysis of historical art can inform, enhance, and afford new relevance to artifacts of the American past. The book is grounded in the understanding that the meanings of objects change over time, in different contexts, and as a consequence of the ways in which they are considered. Inspired by the concept of the object lesson, the study of a material thing or group of things in juxtaposition to convey embodied and underlying ideas, Object Lessons in American Art examines a broad range of art from Princeton University’s venerable collections as well as contemporary works that imaginatively appropriate and reframe their subjects and style, situating them within current social, cultural, and artistic debates on race, gender, the environment, and more. Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum