Slavery as It Exists in America; Slavery as It Exists in England

WHEN ARTISTS after the Civil War faced the great challenge of representing a society recently emancipated from slavery, they brought to the task various assumptions and images that had been deeply ingrained by the system of slavery and by the long campaign to abolish it. Most of the artists working on public monuments in the first years after the war had...

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. …