Eel Spearing at Setauket

Etudes and portraits were conceived as works of art, the former especially as works of artists whose individual perceptions...

The African-American artist Robert S. Duncanson painted landscapes in the style of the Hudson River School. Whether representing the Catskills, the Andes, or the Ohio River Valley, the so-called Hudson River School artists depicted locations in which forests, lakes, mountains, and streams stretched off into infinity and in which humans, if present at all, were mere bystanders at nature’s...

The fictions that whites built about the black people in their midst were very different from those they constructed about one another. In the eyes of almost all the dominant citizens who put themselves at the center of the body politic, scheming Yankee farmers and vaguely disreputable Westerners might be of dubious commercial malleability or low social standing, but they were indisputably in the competitive race that linked citizens across the electorate. African-Americans, however, were not. …