Scott Manning Stevens

A fascinating visual record of nineteenth-century Indigenous communities in the American WestIn the early nineteenth century, Prince Maximilian of Wied traveled the Missouri River to uncover what he called "the natural face of North America"--its landscapes, flora and fauna, and Native inhabitants. Among his small party was artist Karl Bodmer (1809-1893), who would prove to be one of the most accomplished and prolific artists to visit the American frontier. Bodmer and Maximilian traveled more than 2,500 miles together, spending time among the Mandan, Hidatsa, Omaha, Otoe, Pawnee, Yankton, Santee Sioux, Assiniboines, Plains Cree, Blackfeet, Piegans, Bloods, and Gros Ventre. Bodmer's watercolors of the people he met remain among the most compelling visual accounts of the American West, an invaluable record of the Missouri River's Indigenous communities. The first publication to focus on Bodmer as a portraitist, Faces from the Interior includes essays examining his artistic practice, the international dissemination of his images, and the ongoing significance of his work to Indigenous communities.

More than one hundred and fifty years after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still occupies a prominent place in the national collective memory. Paintings and photographs, plays and movies, novels, poetry, and songs portray the war as a battle over the future of slavery, focusing on Lincoln's determination to save the Union, or highlighting the cruelty of brother fighting brother. Battles and battlefields occupy us, too: Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg all conjure up images of desolate landscapes strewn with war dead. Yet battlefields were not the only landscapes altered by the war. Countless individuals saw their daily lives upended while the entire nation suffered. Home Front reveals this side of the war as it happened, comprehensively examining the visual culture of the Northern home front. Through contributions from leading scholars, we discover how the war influenced household economies and the cotton industry; how the absence of young men from the home changed daily life; how war relief work linked home fronts and battlefronts; why Indians on the frontier were pushed out of the riven nation's consciousness during the war years; and how wartime landscape paintings illuminated the nation's past, present, and future. A companion volume to a collaborative exhibition organized by the Newberry Library and the Terra Foundation for American Art, Home Front is the first book to expose the visual culture of a world far removed from the horror of war yet intimately bound to it.