E-Books →Contraband Guides Race, Transatlantic Culture, and the Arts in the Civil War Era

Americans of the Civil War era were struck by the presence of people of color in European art and society, and American artists and authors, both black and white, adapted and transformed European visual material to respond to the particular struggles over the identity of African Americans. Taking up the work of both well- and lesser-known artists and writers―such as the travel writings of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, the paintings of German American Emanuel Leutze, the epistolary exchange between John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, newspaper essays written by Frederick Douglass and William J. Wilson, and the sculpture of freed slave Eugène Warburg―Kaplan lays bare how racial attitudes expressed in mid-nineteenth-century American art were deeply inflected by European traditions.
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