Ashp Podcast

Gregory Downs, UC Davis The Graduate Center, CUNY July 12, 2016In this talk, Gregory Downs discusses the development of slavery and anti-slavery in the United States. He positions the U.S. slave trade in a global context and examines the intricacies of the Second Middle Passage.  Downs analyzes rhetoric framing the North as a symbol of bourgeois modernity, and how it led to the development of the North v. South narratives.  He concludes with the question of why the Civil War occurred in a context where slavery was seen as embedded in the economies of both the North and the South. This talk took place on July 12, 2016, as part of ASHP’s Visual Culture of the Civil War Summer Institute, an NEH professional development program for college and university faculty.

Gregory Downs, UC Davis The Graduate Center, CUNY July 15, 2016In this talk, Gregory Downs presents the complexities of early Reconstruction in the post-bellum United States. Downs examines freedom in proximity to power by looking at the federal government’s implementation of U.S. laws and agencies in the South, specifically analyzing the tail end of Sherman’s March, the surrender at Appomattox, and the difficulties of enforcing the 13th amendment in rural southern areas. This talk took place on July 15, 2016, as part of ASHP’s Visual Culture of the Civil War Summer Institute, an NEH professional development program for college and university faculty.

Ari Kelman, Penn State The Graduate Center, CUNY July 18, 2016In this presentation, Ari Kelman examines the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado and the controversial opening of The Sand Creek Memorial in 2007. Kelman explores the complicated question of how politics and violence engaged on the American borderland, and the interpretation by some unionists that “civilizing Indians” was essential to preserving the Union. This talk took place on July 18, 2016, as part of ASHP’s Visual Culture of the Civil War Summer Institute, an NEH professional development program for college and university faculty. 

Joshua Brown, ASHPThe Graduate Center, CUNYJuly 20, 2016In this presentation, Joshua Brown delves into how Gilded Age newspapers portrayed current events. He analyzes news illustrations of events including The Centennial Exposition, and The Panic of 1873, to analyze how media narratives based on physiognomies vilified African-Americans, working-class people, and immigrants.  This talk took place on July 20, 2016, as part of ASHP’s Visual Culture of the Civil War Summer Institute, an NEH professional development program for college and university faculty.

John Nieto-Phillips, Indiana University-BloomingtonCUNY Graduate Center (via Skype), December 6, 2013In this presentation, John Nieto-Phillips provides an overview of the ways that Latinos and Latinas figure into global Hispanism, or Hispanidad.  He explores the origins of a burgeoning language rights movement, focusing more particularly on New Mexico, and to a lesser extent, on New York City.  This talk was delivered via Skype, so the sound quality is less than optimal. 

Cynthia Tobar, Bronx Community CollegeCUNY Graduate Center, April 9, 2014In this panel discussion moderated by Cynthia Tobar, activists and organizers discuss campus-based movements across CUNY that resisted city and state cutbacks. Hear how self-archiving efforts can ensure a more egaltarian CUNY history. 

Stephen Brier, CUNY Graduate CenterCUNY Graduate Center, April 9, 2014In this panel discussion, moderated by Stephen Brier, former student and faculty activists who led the fight on CUNY campuses to open the University to all NYC high school graduates discuss this transformative historical moment. 

In this panel presentation, scholars Sarah Burns (emerita, Indiana University), Josh Brown (CUNY Graduate Center), and Greg Downs (UC Davis) discuss the visual culture of the post-Civil War era in the fine arts and the illustrated press. 

In this presentation, photography historian Deborah Willis, and historian Barbara Krauthamer discuss the use of portrait photography as historical evidence. Together they examine several photographs of African Americans in the era of the U.S. Civil War, before and after emancipation; and analyze the evidence in the images in terms of the fundamental influence of African Americans, particularly African-American women, in shaping our understanding of this period of American history. 

Richard Samuel West, historian of cartoons and popular publications and founder of New England's Periodyssey, discusses the range of topics in and formats of political cartoons published during the Civil War and delineates how the medium changed over the course of the conflict. This talk took place on July 16, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.

Georgia Barnhill, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts at the American Antiquarian Society, discusses the methods, meanings, and uses of various types of printed Civil War ephemera, and how they were used to document, memorialize and shape public opinion about the war on the home front. This talk took place on July 17, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.

Harold Holzer, chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and the author of numerous books on Lincoln and the Civil War, talks about the visual representations of the emancipation proclamation as well as the images of Abraham Lincoln as emancipator. This talk took place on July 19, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.

Joshua Brown, Executive Director of the American Social History Project and Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, discusses the pictorial journalism of the Civil War and the ways battlefront artists covered the conflict before photography could document warfare. This talk took place on July 11, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.

Sarah Burns, the Ruth N. Halls Professor of the History of Art (emerita) at Indiana University, provides an in-depth analysis of Lilly Martin Spencer's "Home of the Red, White, and Blue." She places the painting within the broader visual context of women, veterans, and the flag during the U.S. Civil War. This talk took place on July 12, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.

Jeanie Attie, professor of history at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, provides a sweeping overview of the roles and images of women during the Civil War. She discusses northern and southern women and the ways the war shifted notions of domesticity and women's public space. This talk took place on July 17, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.

Joshua Brown, Executive Director of the American Social History Project and Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, presents a case study of interpreting a historical event through images. He examines images of the 1863 New York City draft riots from a range of pictorial newspapers in order to piece together the changing nature of the event as well as varying perspectives on the rioters' class and ethnicity. This talk took place on July 12, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.

Alice Fahs, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, presents a broad range of images that made up the visual landscape of the 1860s and explores how the Civil War did and did not transform the dominant images especially for African Americans and women. This talk took place on July 9, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.

María Montoya, New York UniversityCity University of New York, April 25, 2014In this talk, Professor Montoya examines the history of the U.S.-Mexican border, and its role in shaping the national memory and identity of both countries.  Notions of Mexican American citizenship and property rights are entwined with this history, and have shifted over time.  To understand these transformations, Montoya chronicles the history, perception, and significance of the U.S.-Mexican border from 1848 to 1941 to explore its transition from a shared, fluid site to a symbol of exclusion and militarization.

Isabel Martinez, John Jay CollegeCUNY Graduate Center, October 24, 2014In this presentation, Isabel Martinez places the recent experiences of unaccompanied minors migrating from Central America to the United States in a historical context, describing her family’s own youth migration story which begins in Mexico, 1902. She goes on to explore some of the reasons for the recent surge in Latin American youth migration, including increased poverty, violence, and economic instability associated with the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement, the United States’ “crimigration” policies, and the kinds of media attention these groups of young people receive. Professor Martinez discusses the many dangers they confront, detailing the experiences of unaccompanied children as young as seven years old, as well as the challenges of being apprehended and the risks of going undetected. She then presents several strategies for teaching this material to students.

Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, New York UniversityCUNY Graduate Center, October 24, 2014In this lecture, Professor Saldaña-Portillo addresses the multiple ways in which the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has affected the price of labor, increased narco-terrorism, and facilitated the transfer of drugs from Latin America to the United States, as well as the laundering of funds by drug traffickers in the United States and Mexico.  She situates these processes within the parallel language used to describe Islamic terrorism and the vilified image of the "Indio-barbaro del Norte," a term used in the 19th century to refer to Apache enemies of the United States and Mexico.