Browse Items (15 total)
- Collection: Critical Analysis
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White Suffering and the Branded Hand
This essay analyzes the social and racial significance of an unusual mid-nineteenth-century daguerreotype of a white abolitionist’s branded hand.
A Freakish Whiteness: The Circassian Lady and the Caucasian Fantasy
What is the meaning of mid-nineteenth-century portraits of white women with strange names, exotic costumes, and wildly frizzed hair?
As White as Their Masters: Visualizing the Color Line
A discussion of the ambiguity of the color line in nineteenth-century visual representations of race.
On Seeing and Writing Together: An introduction to a multimedia, collaborative writing project
This collaborative essay by a professor and her students in a college writing course demonstrates how the images in the Mirror of Race exhibition may be used to teach research and reflection on the meaning of race in American…
Work and the Poetry of Sterling Brown: Reclaiming Forced Labor
Juxtaposing an 1850 daguerreotype portrait of a slave, a painting by Jean-François Millet, a photograph by Lewis Hine, and a poem by Sterling Brown, this essay seeks to understand how, and under what conditions, even forced labor may be reclaimed and…
Black Civil War Portraiture in Context
An investigation into the kinds of meanings that photographic portraits of black Civil War soldiers had at the time of their making as well as some of the challenges that such a recovery poses for historians today.