No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation investigates how late nineteenth-century American landscape painting encouraged development in areas of seasonal affluence. Through the collection and consumption of land and landscape paintings, I argue, Anglo-Americans asserted their control over and status within several new vacation communities in the Eastern United States. Using landscape paintings as material goods that represented idealized versions of their personal properties, collectors elevated themselves socially, culturally, and economically. By reconstructing these visual and material acquisitions (which I term “buying a view”), my dissertation explores how Gilded Age Americans sought to exert control over resort landscapes, to privatize and commodify views available from those spaces, and monetize the natural environment for their personal gain. Examining the activities of William Trost Richards, Laura Woodward, Benjamin Champney, Rose Lamb, Celia Thaxter, Alice Pike Barney, and other artists who worked closely with hoteliers and second home owners, I demonstrate that late nineteenth-century landscape painters played a central role in the development and promotion of late nineteenth-century elite resorts. By considering the work of amateur and professional women artists alongside pictures by oft-studied male contemporaries, my dissertation shows that a wide range of American landscape painters found success by catering to seasonal consumers’ desire to own aesthetically pleasing landscapes. Through five case studies centered around places in the United States now associated with elite property ownership, I dissect the social and cultural implications for landscape collection in its various forms. I look to the Adirondacks in New York, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, the coast of Maine, St. Augustine and Palm Beach in Florida, and Newport, Rhode Island as the sites for each of my chapters’ examinations. By tracing the activities of specific patrons in each of these communities, this dissertation will shed new light on the ways that landscape patronage underwrote the dominance of the late nineteenth-century leisure class and offer a new account of period collecting that complements existing research focused on urban art buyers. By investigating the cultural work that landscape paintings performed in late nineteenth-century resort communities, my project illuminates an understudied body of American landscape art and extends recent work on the genre’s later history. / 2026-09-17T00:00:00Z

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / Between 1859 and 1909, the African-American press in Boston, Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia nurtured a radical black political consciousness that challenged white supremacy on a national and local level. Specifically, black newspapers provided the ideological foundation for the New Negro movement of the 1910s and 1920s by cultivating this consciousness in readers. This dissertation examines black newspapers as political texts through what I have called figurative black nationalism in the ante-bellum Anglo-African, Douglass' Monthly, and Christian Recorder; through the political independence advocated in the post-Reconstruction New York Age, Cleveland Gazette, and Boston Advocate; and through the tum of the century Woman's Era, Colored American, and Boston Guardian. This study challenges fundamental assumptions about race, politics, and African-American activism between the Civil War and the Progressive Era. First, analyzing how ante-bellum African-Americans used the press to define radical abolition on their own terms shows that they adopted what I call figurative black nationalism through the Anglo-African's serialization of Martin R. Delany's 1859 novel Blake, or The Huts ofAmerica. Second, even as this press moved to the post-bellum south, northern African-Americans became increasingly alienated from the conservative rhetoric of racial spokesmen, particularly as the fall of Reconstruction led to repeal of the 1875 Civil Rights Act and failure of the 1890 Federal Elections Bill. Frances E.W. Harper's serialized novel Minnie's Sacrifice perpetuated the idea that free and freed people shared a post-bellum political outlook in the Christian Recorder, but such unity was elusive in reality. Consequently, northern African-Americans adopted a form of "mugwumpism" that questioned notions of blind African-American loyalty to the Republican Party. Finally, black northerners at the turn of the century reclaimed the radical abolition and political independence of the past in a successful assault on Tuskegee-style accommodation through a radical version of racial uplift. This radical racial uplift was shaped through northern black women's appropriation of Anna Julia Cooper's feminism, through Pauline Hopkins' serial novel Hagar's Daughter, and through William Monroe Trotter's participation in the Niagara Movement. Northern black politics, rather than white Progressivism or southern black conservatism, nurtured twentieth century civil rights activism.

For over three decades, during the height of Gilded Age economic extravagance, the women of New York High Society maintained an elite social identity by possessing, displaying, and cultivating cultural capital. Particularly, High Society women sought to exclude the Nouveaux Riches who, after amassing vast fortunes in industry or trade, came to New York City in search of social position. High Society women distinguished themselves from these social climbers by obeying restrictive codes of speech, body language, and dress that were the manifestations of their cultural capital. However, in a country founded upon an ethos of egalitarianism, exclusivity could not be maintained for long. Mass-circulated media, visual artwork, and etiquette manuals celebrated the Society woman's cultural capital, but simultaneously popularized it, making it accessible to the upwardly mobile. By imitating the representations of High Society life that they saw in newspapers, magazines, and the sketches of Charles Dana Gibson, Nouveau Riche social climbers and even aspirant middle and working class women bridged many of the barriers that Society women sought to impose. / Master of Arts

Serving three times as president of the Cavalry Association, Camp Nine of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), George Tichenor was instrumental in forging Lost Cause ideology into a potent social force in New Orleans. Though more widely remembered in New Orleans for his antiseptic invention, his support of Confederate monuments, Confederate activism, and his wife Margret’s role as vice-president of a chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) are lesser known aspects of Tichenor’s life in New Orleans. This paper examines the cultural changes taking place in New Orleans that allowed Tichenor to become a leader of the Lost Cause movement that transformed New Orleans, with a focus on social networking via the United Confederate Veterans and the collaborative nature of their work with the UDC in New Orleans, a collaboration that opened a cultural and societal pathway for Lost Cause ideology to permeate Southern cities and influence national thinking on how to interpret the history of the Civil War.

No description available.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / In the late nineteenth century, the American art world was highly competitive as artists vied with each other and more established European artists for a small pool of patrons. A few recognized the power of mass media to create celebrity and financial success. They tread carefully into the arena of self-promotion, striking a delicate balance between advertising and maintaining Gilded Age ideas about the purely artistic motivations of a great painter. In 1878, the largely unknown artist William Merritt Chase arrived in New York with the idea that an elaborately decorated studio could potentially make his name in the art world. The plan worked. His Tenth Street Studio was a harmony of color created through his masterful arrangement of bric-a-brac and art objects. It soon attracted media coverage and public attention. Chase quickly realized, however, that the writers who gushed over his studio were more interested in the space than the artist who created it. While the studio had achieved celebrity, its creator had not. In order to attract patrons, Chase needed to garner press coverage of the studio that would refer back to himself as the artist. His solution was a series of paintings of the studio interior itself. Chase depicted wealthy visitors looking at prints, conferring with the artist, even contemplating a purchase of work right off the walls – messages intended to advertise his availability to these potential patrons. These painted “advertisements,” created in the 1880s, redirected public attention from the studio to its creator and solidified his celebrity. In 1890, Chase painted one of the most famous events to ever occur at the Tenth Street Studio – the performance of the Spanish dancer known as the Carmencita. While encapsulating the bohemian atmosphere of the studio, Chase’s portrait of the dancer displayed no trace of the studio or its contents, only a plain muted background. He no longer needed to advertise himself as artist-for-hire because he had already succeeded in this endeavor. His painted studio advertisements had worked. Chase was a bona fide Gilded Age celebrity and a permanent addition to the canon of great American artists.

This study traces the public life of Stephen Dorsey chronologically from his service in the Civil War to the end of his political career, which came with his failure to have a friend appointed governor of New Mexico Territory in 1889. Traditional interpretations of Dorsey are based on a combination of scant evidence, carpetbagger stereotypes, and the assumption that he was guilty of masterminding the monumental swindle of the Star Route Frauds. Closer examination of Dorsey's public life, however, reveals that this traditional view is distorted. A major conclusion of this study is that the assumption on which most traditional views of Dorsey are based, that he was the mastermind behind the Star Route Frauds, is not supported by the evidence. This study shows that it is impossible to study a Gilded Age political figure without also considering his business interests. Many of Dorsey's political activities, for example his involvement in the Compromise of 1877, can be traced to his business enterprises. Although Dorsey was not entirely innocent in the frauds, he was not guilty of the crimes with which the government charged him. This study also concludes that Dorsey was left vulnerable to the prosecution which ended his career in national politics by the peculiarly personal nature of the Republican party in the Gilded Age. That personal control had contributed to Dorsey's rise to power in the Republican party; it also led to his destruction.