by David M. Lubin (1994)
Art historian David Lubin examines the work of six nineteenth-century American artists to show how their paintings both embraced and resisted dominant social values. Lubin argues that artists such as George Bingham and Lily Martin Spencer were aware of the underlying social conflicts of their time and that their work reflected the nation's ambivalence toward domesticity, its conflicting ideas about child rearing, its racial disharmony, and many other issues central to the formation of modern America.--From publisher description.
Thomas Schmidt and Jeremy Schmidt
Follows explorers Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition to seek out -- and stake out -- the fabled Northwest Passage. They traveled from Missouri through uncharted territory to Oregon, fighting rivers, suffering sunstroke, befriending Indians, and surviving hunger, fatigue, and sickness. Includes excerpts from the original journals, the first written account of the area west of the Mississippi.
Paul Graham
A1 - The Great North Road' was Paul Graham's first book, published in 1983. Despite the UK having a vibrant photographic scene at the time, there were only handful of monographic books - Chris Killip and Martin Parr had one each - and no dedicated publishers or distributors. Graham had to self-publish A1, but as the first colour book, it had a startling impact on British photography. Uniting the tradition of social documentary with the fresh approach of new colour, A1 - The Great North Road was transformative on photography in the UK and paved the way for a new generation of British colour photographers to emerge, from Nick Waplington to Anna Fox, Richard Billingham to Tom Wood.
Estill Curtis Pennington
A Southern Collection presents select masterworks from the permanent collection of the Morris Museum of Art on the occasion of the institution's inaugural exhibition. Drawn from a comprehensive survey collection of painting in the South from the late eighteenth century to the present day, the museum's opening exhibit explores an artistic terrain as rich and diverse as the South itself, arranged in categories that reflect critical chronological developments in the art world. A survey of painting activity in the South begins with the travels of itinerant portrait artists working prior to the Civil War. At the same time, landscape painting encompasses a sensitive response to the swamps, bayous and fertile fields of the South. Late in the nineteenth century strong and vivid genre painting competes with the nostalgic effects realized by Southern impressionists, whose shimmering, liquid images are invested with an elusive spirit of place. In this century, those strains of realism and naturalism that characterize the classic body of Southern writing appear in the representational art of painters who defied the modern abstract dictum. And finally, the exciting, compelling works of a current generation of both self-taught artists and sophisticated contemporary painters complete this fascinating, though sometimes neglected, chapter in American art history.
Steven T. Ross
In From Flintlock to Rifle, Professor Ross traces the development of infantry tactics from the mid-eighteenth century, when infantry fought in rigid linear formations, until the second half of the nineteenth century, by which time infantrymen with rifled weapons were learning to advance in open order and use aimed fire. The author demonstrates that this transition in tactics involved social and technological change as well as military innovation. Old Regime armies, recruited from a narrow social base and armed with slow-firing, short-range, inaccurate weapons, relied upon harsh discipline and formalized evolutions to attain tactical proficiency. When the French Royal Army collapsed it was replaced with a mass citizen army. This contained elements of the old tactical system but placed a new emphasis on mobility, flexibility, and individual initiative. Napoleon's rivals either imitated aspects of the French system or sought to copy the spirit of the new tactics, engineering social reforms from above and creating their own citizen armies. After 1815, generals and politicians continued to develop tactical doctrines that embodied the lessons of the Napoleonic wars. Industrialization had a swift impact on weapons technology and firearms improved in range, accuracy, and rate of fire. As a result, military men had to modify their drill and battle tactics to cope with increased firepower. A process initiated by the French Revolution was thus accelerated by the Industrial Revolution.