This volume presents an overview of the social history of modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino art. This collection of thirty-three essays focuses on Latin American artists throughout Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. The author provides a chronology of modern Latin American art; a history of "social art history" in the United States; and synopses of recent theoretical and historical writings by major scholars from Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Chile, and the United States. In her essays, she discusses a vast array of topics including: the influence of the Mexican muralists on the American continent; the political and artistic significance of poster art and printmaking in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and among Chicanos; the role of women artists such as Guatemalan painter Isabel Ruiz; and the increasingly important role of politics and multinational businesses in the art world of the 1970s and 1980s. She explores the reception of Latin American and Latino art in the United States, focusing on major historical exhibits as well as on exhibits by artists such as Chilean Alfredo Jaar and Argentinean Leandro Katz. Finally, she examines the significance of nationalist and ethnic themes in Latin American and Latino art.
In 1860, during their first attempt to create the Golden Circle, several thousand Knights assembled in southern Texas to "colonize" the northern Mexico. Due to insufficient resources and organizational shortfalls, however, that filibuster failed. Later, the Knights shifted their focus and began pushing for disunion, spearheading prosecession rallies, and intimidating Unionists in the South. They appointed regional military commanders from the ranks of the South's major political and military figures, including men such as Elkanah Greer of Texas, Paul J. Semmes of Georgia, Robert C. Tyler of Maryland, and Virginius D. Groner of Virginia. Followers also established allies with the South's rabidly prosecession "fire-eaters," which included individuals such as Barnwell Rhett, Louis Wigfall, Henry Wise, and William Yancy.
These diverse essays recast the place of aesthetics in production & consumption of American literature. Contributors showcase the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring politics, culture, ideology, & conceptions of identity into their critiques, combining close readings of individual works & authors with theoretical discussions.
"In 1875 Anne Whitney traveled to Florence, Italy, to select the marble for a statue of Samuel Adams commissioned for the U.S. Capitol. That summer, in a small village outside Paris, she noticed a woman who worked as a model for the local sculptors. Not the typical artists model, the woman was quite old and would often drowse while sitting for them, her kerchiefed head fallen forward in sleep. Later, when Whitney returned to America, she brought with her not only the completed statue for her respectable commission but the far less conventional Le Modèle, a deeply human image of the old woman. Created at a time when such subjects as the old and the poor were rarely given attention, Whitney's sculpture is highly innovative for its day. Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein's American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions chronicles the lives and works of hundreds of women such as Anne Whitney, telling of their public successes, their private sensibilities and visions, their unique contributions to their chosen art form as women and as individuals. Rich in anecdote and analysis, the book brings to life their personal stories and the times they lived in to create an intimate yet wide-reaching portrait. It is the first comprehensive survey of the American woman's generous contribution to the sculpted form. From small garden bronzes and portrait busts to large-scale equestrian monuments and war memorials, the works of American women sculptors stand in parks, plazas, and public buildings across the country. Often struggling to overcome the persistent obstacle of sexism - and for women of color, racism - these women took part in every significant art movement of their time: they were neoclassicists who worked in marble in Rome, modernists who brought cubism and abstract sculpture to the United States, leaders among the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, and abstract expressionists, minimalists, and installation artists. Yet despite this continuous history of achievement, their stories have gone largely untold, their contributions often unrecognized. As Rubenstein writes in her introduction, "How many of the thousands who pass Bethesda Fountain in Central Park know that it was created by a woman?" Rubenstein takes as her starting point in this history the expressive masks, basketry, and ceramics of pre-Colonial Native American women rarely included in traditional art surveys. Following are Patience Wright, considered by many to be America's first professional sculptor; the women sculptors of the Gilded Age, whose creativity flourished under the influence of the suffrage movement; the women who worked for the Federal Art Project during the Depression, among the founding members of the Sculptor's Guild, and such important abstract sculptors as Louise Nevelson and Louise Bourgeois. The author concludes with the contributions of such young contemporary sculptors as Maya Lin, whose Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall has become one of the country's landmarks. Both major and lesser-known artists are included, and the more conventional definitions of sculpture expanded to consider artists working in a variety of three-dimensional forms. Rubinstein discusses the works of weavers, potters, furniture carvers, and even performance artists, acknowledging the enormous influence women have had in these endeavors. Throughout the book Rubinstein illuminates the works themselves and the artists' techniques with detailed description and commentary, while the text is complemented by more than 300 illustrations. American Women Sculptors will be valued for the author's meticulous research and enjoyed for her appreciation of storytelling. It celebrates a rich, lively history." --
New developments in Civil War scholarship owe much to removal of artificial divides by historians seeking to explore the connections between the home front and the battlefield. Indeed, scholars taking a holistic view of the war have contributed to our understanding of the social complexities of emancipation—of freedom in a white republic—and the multifaceted experiences of both civilians and soldiers. Given these accomplishments, research focusing on military history prompts prominent and recurring debates among Civil War historians. Critics of traditional military history see it as old-fashioned, too technical, or irrelevant to the most important aspects of the war. Proponents of this area of study view these criticisms as a misreading of its nature and potential to illuminate the war. The collected essays in Upon the Fields of Battle bridge this intellectual divide, demonstrating how historians enrich Civil War studies by approaching the period through the specific but nonetheless expansive lens of military history. Drawing together contributions from Keith Altavilla, Robert L. Glaze, John J. Hennessy, Earl J. Hess, Brian Matthew Jordan, Kevin M. Levin, Brian D. McKnight, Jennifer M. Murray, and Kenneth W. Noe, editors Andrew S. Bledsoe and Andrew F. Lang present an innovative volume that deeply integrates and analyzes the ideas and practices of the military during the Civil War. Furthermore, by grounding this collection in both traditional and pioneering methodologies, the authors assess the impact of this field within the social, political, and cultural contexts of Civil War studies. Upon the Fields of Battle reconceives traditional approaches to subjects like battles and battlefields, practice and policy, command and culture, the environment, the home front, civilians and combatants, atrocity and memory, revealing a more balanced understanding of the military aspects of the Civil War’s evolving history.
