Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia

There are many and obvious similarities between European and American, especially British and North American, literary and visual images of blacks. Ever since the eighteenth century there had been a transatlantic interchange of writings about slavery ...

~~Before we, too, abandon Ariadne on her desert isle, let us pause to consider her as the foundation of nineteenth-century American landscape painting. The future wife of Bacchus, nature god of wine and revelry, Ariadne, in all her sumptuous availability, is the trope of bountiful America ready for the taking. Such availability, in...

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. …