The Power of Music

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

What can Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness tell us about art and America before 1900? Historical exhibitions of art, including this one, face vexing questions about representing the past. Perhaps the art displayed epitomizes only a special segment of a nation’s past. Perhaps the objects tell us most about the...

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. …