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This essay attends to the presence of a small portrait carried by an enslaved character, Georges, in Victor Séjour's 1837 sketch "Le Mulâtre" ("The Mulatto"). While most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction deploys miniature portraits to mediate social ties and signal emotional connection, in "Le Mulâtre" the carrying of a miniature departs from this trope, marking alienation, not affiliation. Reading Séjour's text against popular depictions and material histories of ivory portrait miniatures, I demonstrate that these familiar objects of eighteenthand nineteenth-century life function not merely as emblems of intimacy, as past scholars have argued, but rather as tools of what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon calls "intimate distance"--a social configuration that depends on asserting closeness with geographically distributed white populations while disavowing intimacy with physically present Black and Indigenous peoples. Although the portrait is said to depict Georges's father, who readers know is also the man's white enslaver, the object remains hidden from view in a bag until the final moments of the sketch, which concludes with the father's beheading and the son's suicide. I argue that by emplotting the miniature in a moment of bloodshed rather than of sentiment, Séjour registers the affective and material violence that undergirds white colonial definitions of the family, and invites broader critical comparison of the ways that both sentimental and colonial structures depend on racialized distributions of affections. In the concluding portion of this essay, I turn to the "little buckskin pouch" containing Alfred's miniature and consider how its resemblance to Afro-Atlantic folk charms recasts the racialized binaries traditionally advanced by miniature portraits. Viewed as part of a charm, the portrait underscores that whiteness is a ritualized notion dependent on material signifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I review the literature on the social integration of black immigrants residing in the United States between 1910 and 2018, with the goal of highlighting how the growth of the black immigrant population has complicated the scholarly understanding of the causes and consequences of both intraracial disparities among blacks and disparities between blacks and whites in the United States. The article comprises three substantive sections. First, I examine the changing birth-country composition of the black immigrant population that arrived in the United States from 1900 to 1930 and review the literature on the social integration of black immigrants during the early twentieth century. Second, I review the literature that demonstrates how selective migration and disparate pre-1965 histories have shaped contemporary disparities between black immigrants and black Americans. Third, I discuss the implications of black immigration for understanding the evolution of racial disparities in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses methods of interpreting the historical significance of photographs. The author suggests the identity and motives of the photographer are integral in analyzing a photograph's historical value. Landscape photography was used to chart territories of the North American West. The author suggests photographs of Indian life were intended to depict the state's power over Indians. Photographer Frederick Dally took portraits of North American Indians while touring tribal villages.

The methodology developed in this study presents an approach to the concurrent evaluation of Risk Management (RM) effectiveness during project execution. The method proposed is an adaptation of an approach developed and advocated by Khlebopros et al. (2007) for the mathematical modelling of complex systems, namely the analysis and effects of natural catastrophes. Hence, the method utilizes a phase portrait approach to identify the Prime Cost (PC) of RM of a project. Furthermore, the method provides an approach for comparing the individual identified risks with this PC, and subsequently highlighting a way of classifying and prioritising risks into a rank order for RM attention. The MERA (Multiple Estimating Risk Analysis) approach was utilized for the quantification of risk impact and ultimately the creation of the phase portrait. Besides being accurate and intuitively understandable, the methodology is relatively simple to implement and provides a rapid visualisation of the overall risk extent of a project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses colonial upper-class Arkansas women including Marie Françoise Petit de Coulange, Madeleine Ménard and Marie Félicité de Morand de Vallière. Topics discussed include these women enjoying all the civil rights that men of that time did and artifacts including five portraits left behind by the women.

This article examines how Amerindians participate agentially in a circuit of contagious experience as portrait subjects of settler artists and photographers like Benjamin West, George Catlin, E. S. Curtis, and others. Embodiment in a portrait is a dialogical and iterative bridge that enables the subject to contextualize an address to the home community through religion, kinship, or culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-emancipated author, activist and philosopher turned art historian, Frederick Douglass spent a lifetime visualizing back to a white dominant schema intent on trading in racist grotesques of socially determinist and politically reductive contortions of black bodies and souls. Across his photographic and fine-art portraits, he endorsed a revisionist aesthetic theory and carved out an alternative iconographic space within which to expose, debunk and demythologize the racist claim that “Negroes look all like.” Douglass's visual aesthetic took as its starting point the formal, political and ideological importance of representing black subjects as psychologically complex individuals rather than as generic types. At the heart of Douglass's theory of portraiture was his conviction that all likenesses of African American subjects must do justice to “the face of the fugitive slave” by conveying the “inner” via the “outer man,” and thereby privilege emotional depth rather than physical surface in order to extrapolate a full gamut of lived realities otherwise annihilated out of existence. Douglass worked extensively with the signifying possibilities of his own physiognomy as a representative test case by which to bear witness to the interior complexities of black subjects missing from, or remaining fugitives at large within, white artists' surface-only renderings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this brief essay, I review Catherine Opie's midcareer retrospective at the Guggenheim focusing on 3 of her self-portraits that elaborate on her leatherdyke identity. Interpreting these works through the scholarship of Ann Cvetkovich and the literature of Dorothy Allison, I read the progression fromSelf-Portrait/CuttingtoSelf-Portrait/PerverttoSelf-Portrait/Nursingas a photographic argument regarding how sexuality can be generatively constituted through traumatic experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Spiritualism in the United States, focusing on the period after the U.S. Civil War when images of the assassinated U.S. President Abraham Lincoln were widely available in popular culture. The 1870 meeting between former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, a strong believer in the occult, with spirit photographer William Mumler in Boston, Massachusetts is recounted. Other topics include sisters Kate and Maggie Fox notable for communicating with the dead, the 1869 novel "The Gates Ajar" by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and the social impact of large-scale loss and grief due to the Civil War on the American public.

Between 1821 and 1842, Charles Bird King painted a series of portraits of Native American diplomats for Thomas L. McKenney, founding Superintendent of Indian Affairs. These pictures were hung in a gallery in McKenney's office in the War Department in Washington, DC, and were later copied by lithographers for inclusion in McKenney and James Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1836–44). Significantly, the production and circulation of these portraits straddles a period of tremendous change in the diplomatic interactions between the United States and Native tribes. This essay analyzes a selection of these images for their complex messages about the sovereignty of Indian people and their appropriate interactions with European American culture. Paying particular attention to pictures of leaders of southern nations, including the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole, I discuss the sitters' strategies of self-fashioning within the context of long-standing cultural exchange in the region. In addition, I offer a reading of the meaning of the Indian gallery as a whole that challenges the conventional wisdom that it is an archive produced exclusively to impose US control on the subjects included, arguing instead for the inclusion of portrait-making within this history of interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers the author's view on designing a children's art center in public library systems in the U.S. She notes that one of the benefits of starting an art center is its low start-up cost, and low maintenance cost, as the only expensive item in any art center is the furniture. She states that an art center should provide children the opportunity to view and analyze quality works of art as well as giving them the chance to create their own artwork. The author offers some sample displays that she have been using in her library art center, including self-portraits, art and shapes, and art that tells a story.

The article discusses the artistic influence of American painter Gilbert Stuart on 19th century artists. It describes Stuart's portraits of famous Americans such as U.S. president George Washington, his relationship to such artists as Joseph Delaplaine, Benjamin Waterhouse, and Henry Pickering, and his artistic role in criticizing British political policies during the American Revolution. Other subjects under discussion include Stuart's materialism, his use of tobacco, cigars, and snuff, and his satirical and mocking portraits of British king George III.

The article discusses the painting "The Atlantic Cable Projectors," an 1866 commemorative portrait painting of the business leaders responsible for laying the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. The article describes the work of the painter Daniel Huntington, the historical significance of the cable operation led by the president of Atlantic Telegraph Company Cyrus W. Field, and the symbolic aspects of the painting in relation to American ideals of innovation, progress, and technological development. Other subjects under discussion include the influence of the painting "Men of Progress: American Inventors" by Christian Schussele on Huntington's portrait, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the relation between American art and capitalism.

The article focuses on conceptualizing and integrating the practice called funds of literate identity regarding identification of literacy practices in teaching practices in the U.S. for English language. Topics discussed include creating self-portraits by multilingual students to express literate identity, using the research of professor Moisès Esteban-Guitart and Luis C. Moll to examine funds of literate identity through and expressing linguistic abilities by multilingual students.

Countering previous psycho-biographical readings of Julia Thecla's (1896-1973) Full Moon (1945), and the politics of self-representation and female self-portraits more broadly, it is argued here that Thecla's embrace of Surrealist strategies employed in this painting, such as female masquerade, are a means to address the intersecting and interdependent realms of both public and private that contributed to her identity as a professional artist, as well as pointing to the gendered practices of the art world in the post World War II era of the United States. Overall, the artist's gendered performance in Full Moon is framed as an act of non-verbal resistance, which becomes as important as Thecla's own collective work with the Women Artists' Salon of Chicago formed to promote visibility of women artists from 1937 to the early 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A shift of historic proportions has started to take shape in the Americas with the election of Barack Obama as President of the US in 2008. Revealingly, many of the measures Obama has begun to implement are based on ideas originally supported by Third Text over the last thirty years. It is perhaps not surprising that the most iconic image over the last half-century in the US is Shepard Fairey's 2008 poster HOPE, which features a famous almost Che-like portrait of Obama, now in the National Portrait Gallery, even as the poster was most commonly seen along with graffiti in the streets during the election. Similarly, there is another artist who gained new significance in the US recently: Theodore A Harris, whose anti-imperialist collages in the tradition of John Heartfield present searing critiques of US government policies both at home and abroad. Both artists provide potential clues for glimpsing the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the portrait entitled "Robert, Calvin, Martha and William Scott and Mila," which portrays the social condition of the slaves and the morality of slavery in the U.S. during the 18th and 19th centuries. It mentions that the portrait features the children of Reverend William Anderson Scott, a spiritual leader of the Presbyterian Church in New Orleans, Louisiana from 1842 to 1854, and the slave named Mila. It mentions that when Scott was questioned about slavery, he argued that the issue of slavery is political and not ecclesiastical in nature, and is therefore outside the view of the church. It notes that artist's representation of Mila is an atypical departure from typical 19th-century portrayals of slaves.

This essay demonstrates that Gilbert Stuart's Athenaeum portrait of George Washington (1796) has operated historically as a devotional cult image-an icon in the strictest sense of the word-in America's civil religion. Patterns of dissemination and ritual display surrounding the 1932 bicentennial celebration of the birth of George Washington highlight the Athenaeum's totemic function, symbolically linking individuals to national traditions and to one another. Consideration of this cult practice reveals how the Athenaeum was sacralized as a national icon and employed during the 1930s to assuage anxieties arising from potentially disruptive domestic threats and as an ideologically charged visual component of American foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses historic Native American portraits that were painted of Native Americans who had made the journey to Europe. Artists discussed in the article include Simon van de Passe, John White, John Russell, Joshua Reynolds, and George Romney. Mysteries surrounding two particular portraits are also discussed. These portraits have been titled “King Hendrick,” which features an unknown Mohawk Indian, and “Mrs. Penobscot,” which features a supposed Native American in European dress.

The article reports on the reflection of personalities by the aid of the hands in the U.S. The hands are the key to one of the most perceptive senses and used as a tool and a weapon. The author offers images of hands which reflects the personality and the life of the person. In addition, the author said that these images are honest and deeply perceptive portraits.

This article presents the life-history of American artist Grant Wood, associated with American Gothic. Although American Gothic is rightly famous as an avatar of regionalism, capturing the spirit of isolationism in the United States between the wars, it remains unexamined as a signal document in Wood's own emotional life. Wood's tender portrait of his mother at age seventy-one, provided the direct prototype for the female figure in American Gothic. Wood remembered his father as strict and taciturn, a man apart from the rest of the family. He was almost true to his word. At age forty-four, Wood suddenly wed Sara Sherman Maxon, an actress and opera singer from Cedar Rapids.

The article presents information on Guy Johnson, superintendent of Indian Affairs for Britain's northern colonies. It also explains the masculine imagery of the unusual portrait as a direct response to the unprecedented challenges Johnson faced as a loyalist in charge of upholding the crown policies at a time of revolution. Johnson was a resident of New York's Mohawk Valley. His prosperity had enabled him to purchase a residence that included a art studio, a picture gallery, a workshop for his assistants and an elegant garden. His deerskin leggings and moccasins were recognized by eighteenth-century Europeans as quintessentially Indian.

In 1870 the Boston, Massachusetts-based firm of Louis Prang and Company, one of the leading dealers of chromolithography, published a portrait of Hiram R. Revels, the newly admitted senator from Mississippi, based on an oil painting by the German-immigrant artist and Union army veteran Theodore Kaufmann. Historians and art historians have reached out to one another's work for each discipline's distinctive resources and perspectives, but for the most part each then retreats back to its respective favored intellectual turf, its favored approaches and purview, an independence that ultimately confines historical understanding.

In 1889, Thomas Eakins was commissioned to paint a portrait of Dr. David Hayes Agnew to commemorate his exemplary career as a physician and teacher at The University of Pennsylvania. What was originally proposed as a three-quarters portrait of the retiring professor quickly became an enormous painting depicting an operating theater with Dr. Agnew assuming his role as both surgeon and educator. When comparing this piece with an earlier Eakins’ painting, The Gross Clinic, one can trace the rapid evolution of surgical techniques that accompanied medicine’s advancement in the late 19th century. Eakins obviously embraced this progress, but was the public ready to do so too? [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Presents several portraits of children in eighteenth-century America. Background on Rosina Downs; Details on the story of Fanny Lawrence; Images of black freed girls.

Focuses on the portraits of Plains Indian by Getrude Käsebier in the U.S. Evidence to the skill and aesthetic inclinations of Käsebier; Sense of movement and vitality of the figures; Art of pictorialist photography.

Focuses on the portraits painted by John Singleton Copley in the U.S. Use of the portraiture for the expression of colonial and national identities; Description of the paintings; Characteristics of the women.

Examines the theme of several portraits of people being exhibited in the U.S. Fixation of the artist, Cindy Sherman, on her own body which became changeable depending on the applied cosmetics, wardrobe and setting; Strangeness of the portraits of people with disabilities shot by Diane Arbus; Accomplishment of Tabata Hideomi's self-portraiture that deals with mortality.