"New editions of the coveted five original books and the anticipated new volumes, which shall complete the series. The completed set will include ten sumptuous books in five volumes with up-to-date introductions and more full-color illustrations, printed on high-quality art stock for books that will last a lifetime. This monumental publication offers expert commentary and a lavishly illustrated history of the representations of people of African descent ranging from the ancient images of Pharaohs created by unknown hands to the works of the great European masters such as Bosch, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Hogarth to stunning new creations by contemporary black artists. Featuring thousands of beautiful, moving, and often little-known images of black people, including queens and slaves, saints and soldiers, children and gods, The Image of the Black in Western Art provides a treasury of masterpieces from four millennia--a testament to the black experience in the West and a tribute to art's enduring power to shape our common humanity"--Book Jacket.

They also consider the artists' responses to foreign prototypes, travel and training, changing exhibition venues, and audience expectations. The persistence of certain themes--childhood, marriage, the family, and the community; the attainment and reinforcement of citizenship; attitudes toward race; the frontier as reality and myth; and the process and meaning of making art--underscores evolving styles and standards of storytelling. Divided into four chronological sections, the book begins with the years surrounding the American Revolution and the birth of the new republic, when painters such as Copley, Peale, and Samuel F. B. Morse incorporated stories within the expressive bounds of portraiture. During the Jacksonian and pre-Civil War decades from about 1830 to 1860, Mount, Bingham, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others painted genre scenes featuring lighthearted narratives that growing audiences for art could easily read and understand.

Examines the vast array of art produced by African Americans in response to the continuing impact of anti-Black violence and how it is used to protest, process, mourn and memorialize those events.

What is the nature and purpose of the Black Church? What is the relationship of the scholar of religion to the Black Church? While black churches have been a major component of the religious landscape of African American communities for centuries, little critical attention has been given to these questions outside an apologetic stance. This book seeks to correct this trend by examining some of the major issues facing black churches in the twenty-first century. From a challenge to traditional ways of addressing sexism within black churches to African American Christianity's relationship to popular culture, this set of reflections seeks to offer new perspectives on what it might mean to be Black and Christian in the United States.

In The Lincoln Enigma, Gabor Boritt invites renowned Lincoln scholars, and rising new voices, to take a look at much-debated aspects of Lincoln's life--including his possible gay relationships, his plan to send blacks back to Africa, and his high-handed treatment of the Constitution. Boritt explores Lincoln's proposals that looked to a lily-white America. Jean Baker marvels at Lincoln's loves and marriage. David Herbert Donald compares Lincoln and Jefferson Davis as Commanders-in-Chief. Douglas Wilson shows us the young Lincoln--not the strong leader of popular history, but a man who struggles to find his purpose. Gerald Prokopowicz searches for the military leader, William C. Harris for the peacemaker, and Robert Bruce meditates on Lincoln and death. In a final section Boritt and Harold Holzer offer a fascinating portfolio of Lincoln images in modern art. Acute and thought-provoking in their observations, this all-star cast of historians--including two Pulitzer and three Lincoln Prize winners--questions our assumptions of Lincoln, and provides a new vitality to our ongoing reflections on his life and legacy.

A delightful look at how nineteenth-century American artists portrayed children and childhood

Dressing the Resistance is a celebration of how we use clothing, fashion, and costume to ignite activism and spur social change. Weaving together historical and current protest movements across the globe, Dressing the Resistance explores how everyday people and the societies they live in harness the visual power of dress to fight for radical change. American suffragettes made and wore dresses from old newspapers printed with voting slogans. Male farmers in rural India wore their wives' saris while staging sit-ins on railroad tracks against government neglect. Costume designer and dress historian Camille Benda analyzes cultural movements and the clothes that defined them through nearly 200 archival images, photographs, and paintings that bring each event to life, from ancient Roman rebellions to the #MeToo movement, from twentieth century punk subcultures to Black Lives Matter marches.

The Punished Self describes enslavement in the American South during the eighteenth century as a systematic assault on Blacks' sense of self. Alex Bontemps focuses on slavery's effects on the slaves' framework of self-awareness and understanding. Whites wanted Blacks to act out the role "Negro" and Blacks faced a basic dilemma of identity: how to retain an individualized sense of self under the incredible pressure to be Negro? Bontemps addresses this dynamic in The Punished Self. The first part of The Punished Self reveals how patterns of objectification were reinforced by written and visual representations of enslavement. The second examines how captive Africans were forced to accept a new identity and the expectations and behavioral requirements it symbolized. Part 3 defines and illustrates the tensions inherent in slaves' being Negro in order to survive. Bontemps offers fresh interpretations of runaway slave ads and portraits. Such views of black people expressing themselves are missing entirely from other historical sources. This book's revelations include many such original examples of the survival of the individual in the face of enslavement.

Over the last forty years, renewed interest in the career of Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937) has vaulted him into expanding scholarly discourse on American art. Consequently, he has emerged as the most studied and recognized representative of African American art during the nineteenth century. In fact, Tanner, in the spirit of political correctness and racial inclusiveness, has gained a prominent place in recent textbooks on mainstream American art and his painting, The Banjo Lesson (1893), has become an iconic symbol of black creativity. In addition, Tanner achieved national recognition when the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1991 and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2012 celebrated him with major retrospectives. The latter exhibition brought in a record number of viewers. While Tanner lived a relatively simple life where his faith and family dictated many of the choices he made daily, his emergence as a prominent black artist in the late nineteenth century often thrust him openly into coping with the social complexities inherent with America’s great racial divide. In order to fully appreciate how he negotiated prevailing prejudices to find success, this book places him in the context of a uniquely talented black man experiencing the demands and rewards of nineteenth-century high art and culture. By careful examination on multiple levels previously not detailed, this book adds greatly to existing Tanner scholarship and provides readers with a more complete, richly deserved portrait of this preeminent American master.