A groundbreaking examination of the effect of modernity on established norms.
Tracing the history-changing intertwined development of slavery and photography.
As Fox-Amato (History/Univ. of Idaho) clearly demonstrates in his first book, photography helped shape the culture and politics of slavery while slavery shaped the development of photography as an aesthetic form. The daguerreotype appeared in the United States in the 1840s, followed by the ambrotype, tintype, and lighter carte de visite, which decreased exposure time, cost, and weight, enabling pictures to be mailed. Large cities had multiple studios, and itinerant photographers filled a burgeoning market. Both North and South used photography as a cultural weapon. It gave both slavers and abolitionists a sense of legitimacy and urgency, which served to heighten the crisis and kill any hope of compromise. “Part of photography’s unique and unsettling role in the Civil War era,” writes the author, “was to open up a new cultural space…through which Americans defined the boundaries of personhood and debated the social potential of enslaved African Americans.” Of course, masters controlled how slaves were photographed, and they created a picture of a comfortable, harmonious, familial form of bondage. They forbade positive depictions of stature, literacy, or intellect. As such, the photos defined the limits of slaves’ identity, eliminating their personhood. Abolitionists used photographs to build bonds with other activists. While abolitionists widely used the image of the kneeling slave begging for justice, they did not use pictures of brandings, scars, and other evidence of violence. Those pictures only showed the victimhood of slavery, and slaves were more interested in being seen as persons. Slaves—particularly city slaves, who had more freedom and cash—were quick to have photos taken. They helped tie together the families of escaped slaves and identified loved ones whose freedom a freeman wanted to buy. As Fox-Amato shows, photography played a significant role in the debates over notions of status, identity, and community, and those boundaries regarding personhood continued well into the following century.
A groundbreaking examination of the effect of modernity on established norms.Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-066393-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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