Browse Exhibits (7 total)
Abolitionists
Abolitionism is the principled commitment to end slavery in any form. In contrast to gradualists, such as Abraham Lincoln before the Civil War, who then sought only to limit slavery from spreading and to work for its eventual withering away, abolitionists agitated for the immediate and total end of slavery...
Coming to America
The land of opportunity. The American dream. The melting pot. For tens of millions of people, these have not been mere cliches but rather the hope and the reality of coming to America. Even though immigrants have faced prejudice and often suffered bitter disappointment, America, and the United States, in particular, has been and continues to be a place where people have wanted to come to start new lives, and that has been one of this nation's best strengths...
Frontiers of the Human Body
The 19th century was fascinated with the human body. We tend to think of modern Americans as especially obsessed with the body. given our fixations on exercise, dieting, plastic surgery, and other body-image crazes...
Gender Benders
Are race and gender comparable categories? We are used to thinking about male and female in two ways: by sex, which distinguishes people as male and female according to anatomical differences, and by gender, which distinguishes people according to attributes and behaviors we consider masculine or feminine, such as what clothes one wears. or how to move one's body, or what work one does, and so on...
Main Exhibition
The exhibition displays digital scans of the very earliest American photographs, from the 1840s to the late 1800s. We believe that these early photographs have the power to displace us from our usual ways of seeing and provoke us into reflection and conversation about the meaning of race.
Slaves in Black and White
In December of 1863, at the height of the Civil War, a group of eight former slaves from New Orleans made a tour of northern cities to have their photographs taken to bolster support for the war effort and to raise funds for schools for emancipated slaves. New Orleans had been occupied by the Union army since April 1862...
Violence
Violence has been central to the story of race in the United States. Violence permeated the colonization of the Americas by the Europeans. In the colonies that became the United States, the violence that constituted a slow-motion genocide against the indigenous peoples...