Week 1: March 1
Introductions, Overview, and Visualizing the Antebellum Plantation
Introductions, Overview, and Visualizing the Antebellum Plantation
Reading #1 John Michael Vlach, “Perpetuating the Past: Landscape Paintings Then and Now,” in Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art, Angela D. Mack and Stephen G. Hoffius, eds. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 16-29.
Questions to consider while reading:
How and why did plantation paintings change from before to after the war?
According to Vlach, in what ways are plantation paintings a fiction?
Reading #2: David W. Blight, Race and Reunion, prologue, p. 1-5
Question to consider while reading: Blight concludes in the prologue that race and reunion were dependent upon each other in the collective memory of the Civil War? How so?
Images for this week: