Frederick Douglass

American historians refer to the period of the late 1820s to about 1850 as the Jacksonian Era, a way of indicating the importance of the polarizing figure of Andrew Jackson, president from 1829 to 1837, in nearly every aspect of politics, culture, and society in the United States during these years. Jackson was a leader like no other the young nation had seen. The first six presidents had all been...

The contours of the category picture are neither as obvious nor as firm as they may seem. Tracking them over time betrays subtle historical shifts, oppositions, and particularities of meaning. As America passed from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, the category took on special importance for those extolling the merits of photography. For some, it rationalized shoehorning the...

Images of the black subject, whether artistic, documentary, or anthropological, are forever fixed in the popular imagination through photography ...

The centerpiece of the 1997 exhibition “In Their Own Right: Images of African Americans from The Art Institute of Chicago” was a pre-Civil War daguerreotype of the Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass (fig. 1) that the museum had recently acquired. “In Their Own...