Enfilade

From Michael Imhof Verlag:

Anna Dorothea Therbusch in Berlin und Brandenburg: Werke, Technik, Kontext (Berlin: Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2024), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-3731913788, €40.

Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721–1782) war eine der bedeutendsten Künstlerinnen des 18. Jahrhunderts. Schon als junge Frau arbeitete sie für Adlige im Umfeld des preußischen Königshauses. Später reüssierte sie in Paris, wo ihr als einer der wenigen Frauen überhaupt im Jahr 1767 die Aufnahme in die wichtigste europäische Kunstakademie der Zeit, die Pariser Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, gelang. Zurück in ihrer Heimatstadt wurde sie eine gefragte Porträtmalerin der Berliner Gesellschaft und fertigte auch mythologische Historien für die Schlösser Friedrichs II. an. Das Buch macht erstmals die in Berlin und Brandenburg aufbewahrten Gemälde der außergewöhnlichen Preußin systematisch in einem Buch greifbar. Darüber hinaus vermittelt es neue Erkenntnisse zu Therbuschs Arbeitsweise und den von ihr verwendeten Materialien. Die thematischen Essays verfolgen übergreifende Fragen zum Leben und künstlerischen Schaffen der Malerin und dienen so zugleich als aktuelle Einführung in ihr Gesamtwerk.

From Bloomsbury:

Anne Nellis Richter, The Gallery at Cleveland House: Displaying Art and Society in Late Georgian London (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-1350372757, $120.

In 1806, the Marquess and Marchioness of Stafford opened a gallery at Cleveland House, London, to display their internationally-renowned collection of Old Master paintings to the public. A ticket to the gallery’s Wednesday afternoon openings was a sought-after prize, granting access to the collection and the house’s dazzling interior in the company of artists, celebrities, and Britain’s elite. This book explores the gallery’s interior through the lens of its abundant material culture, including paintings in gilded frames, furniture, silver oil lamps, flower arrangements, and the numerous printed catalogues and guidebooks that made the gallery visible to those who might never cross its threshold.

Through detailed analysis of these objects and a wide range of other visual, material, textual, and archival sources, the book presents the gallery at Cleveland House as a methodological case study on how the display of art in the 19th century was shaped by notions about public and private space, domesticity, and the role art galleries played in the formation of national culture. In doing so, the book also explains how and why magnificent private galleries and the artworks and objects they contained gripped the public imagination during a critical period of political and cultural transformation during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Combining historical, cultural, and material analysis, the book will make essential reading for researchers in British art in the Regency period, museum studies, collecting studies, social history, and the histories of interior decoration and design in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Anne Nellis Richter is an independent scholar and adjunct faculty, Smithsonian Internship Semester program, at Smith College.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations

Introduction: ‘The Finest in England’
1  ‘A Very Complete Business’: Designing and Building the Gallery
2  ‘The High Attraction of the Spectacle’: Displaying Sociability
3  ‘The Superb Furniture within’: Materiality and the Domestic Interior
4  ‘We Have Lately Been Much Attacked’: Exhibiting Morality
5  ‘To Private Collections Alone’: The Apotheosis of the Private Gallery
Conclusion: The ‘Home’ of Art

Forthcoming from Penn Press:

Gloria McCahon Whiting, Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), 360 pages, ISBN: 978-1512824490, $40.

Explores how Black New Englanders maintained a sense of belonging among their kin in the face of slavery

As winter turned to spring in the year 1699, Sebastian and Jane embarked on a campaign of persuasion. The two wished to marry, and they sought the backing of their community in Boston. Nothing, however, could induce Jane’s enslaver to consent. Only after her death did Sebastian and Jane manage to wed, forming a long-lasting union even though husband and wife were not always able to live in the same household.

New England is often considered a cradle of liberty in American history, but this snippet of Jane and Sebastian’s story reminds us that it was also a cradle of slavery. From the earliest years of colonization, New Englanders bought and sold people, most of whom were of African descent. In Belonging, Gloria McCahon Whiting tells the region’s early history from the perspective of the people, like Jane and Sebastian, who belonged to others and who struggled to maintain a sense of belonging among their kin. Through a series of meticulously reconstructed family narratives, Whiting traces the contours of enslaved people’s intimate lives in early New England, where they often lived with those who bound them but apart from kin. Enslaved spouses rarely were able to cohabit; fathers and their offspring routinely were separated by inheritance practices; children could be removed from their mothers at an enslaver’s whim; and people in bondage had only partial control of their movement through the region, which made more difficult the task of maintaining distant relationships. But Belonging does more than lay bare the obstacles to family stability for those in bondage. Whiting also charts Afro-New Englanders’ persistent demands for intimacy throughout the century and a half stretching from New England’s founding to the American Revolution. And she shows how the work of making and maintaining relationships influenced the region’s law, religion, society, and politics. Ultimately, the actions taken by people in bondage to fortify their families played a pivotal role in bringing about the collapse of slavery in New England’s most populous state, Massachusetts.

Gloria McCahon Whiting is E. Gordon Fox Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Published in 2018, Slavery in the North was released in paperback earlier this year by Penn Press:

Marc Howard Ross, Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0812250381 (hardback), $70 / ISBN: 978-1512826128 (paperback), $30.

In 2002, we learned that President George Washington had eight (and, later, nine) enslaved Africans in his house while he lived in Philadelphia from 1790 to 1797. The house was only one block from Independence Hall and, though torn down in 1832, it housed the enslaved men and women Washington brought to the city as well as serving as the country’s first executive office building. Intense controversy erupted over what this newly resurfaced evidence of enslaved people in Philadelphia meant for the site that was next door to the new home for the Liberty Bell. How could slavery best be remembered and memorialized in the birthplace of American freedom? For Marc Howard Ross, this conflict raised a related and troubling question: why and how did slavery in the North fade from public consciousness to such a degree that most Americans have perceived it entirely as a ‘Southern problem’?

Although slavery was institutionalized throughout the Northern as well as the Southern colonies and early states, the existence of slavery in the North and its significance for the region’s economic development has rarely received public recognition. In Slavery in the North, Ross not only asks why enslavement disappeared from the North’s collective memories but also how the dramatic recovery of these memories in recent decades should be understood. Ross undertakes an exploration of the history of Northern slavery, visiting sites such as the African Burial Ground in New York, Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the ports of Rhode Island, old mansions in Massachusetts, prestigious universities, and rediscovered burying grounds. Inviting the reader to accompany him on his own journey of discovery, Ross recounts the processes by which Northerners had collectively forgotten 250 years of human bondage and the recent—and continuing—struggles over recovering, and commemorating, what it entailed.

Marc Howard Ross is the William Rand Kenan, Jr., Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Bryn Mawr College. He is author of numerous books and is editor of Culture and Belonging in Divided Societies, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  Collective Memory
2  Surveying Enslavement in the North
3  Slavery and Collective Forgetting
4  Enslaved Africans in the President’s House
5  Memorializing the Enslaved on Independence Mall
6  The Bench by the Side of the Road
7  Burying Grounds
8  Overcoming Collective Forgetting
Epilogue

Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments

From Yale UP:

Michael Hattem, The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 360 pages, ISBN: 978-0300270877, $35.

The surprising history of how Americans have fought over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution for nearly two and a half centuries

Americans agree that their nation’s origins lie in the Revolution, but they have never agreed on what the Revolution meant. For nearly two hundred and fifty years, politicians, political parties, social movements, and a diverse array of ordinary Americans have constantly reimagined the Revolution to fit the times and suit their own agendas. In this sweeping take on American history, Michael D. Hattem reveals how conflicts over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution—including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—have influenced the most important events and tumultuous periods in the nation’s history; how African Americans, women, and other oppressed groups have shaped the popular memory of the Revolution; and how much of our contemporary memory of the Revolution is a product of the Cold War. By exploring the Revolution’s unique role in American history as a national origin myth, Hattem shows how the meaning of the Revolution has never been fixed, how remembering the nation’s founding has often done far more to divide Americans than to unite them, and how revising the past is an important and long‑standing American political tradition.

Michael D. Hattem is a historian of early America and author of Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution. He is the associate director of the Yale–New Haven Teachers Institute and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.