Publication Type: Internal Paper
Abstract: This paper addresses the historic links between American cartographic production and nineteenth-century images of westward migration. It argues that a number of American artists, who struggled to adapt aesthetic and intellectual modes of vision to their pictures of uncharted frontier spaces, were also largely informed by the ideologies of Manifest Destiny and a “golden age” in American cartography that effloresced in response to Western exploration and settlement.

Before the annexation of the expansive territories between the Mississippi River and California, many Euro-Americans already envisioned a nation that spanned the continent from Atlantic to Pacific. Lured by the promise of gold and new agricultural opportunities in lush California valleys, thousands of fortune-seekers consequently found themselves swept westward in a tide of emigration by mid-century. The urgent clamor for maps of the “new” regions - conceived initially as the “Great Desert” or simply as “Indian country” - spurred the rapid proliferation of cartographic firms, government surveys, and the publication of emigrant guides for navigation through the American southwest. This paper will argue that such maps and geographic texts, alongside the rhetoric of westward travel, in turn, fashioned the lens through which a number of American artists understood – visually and conceptually - the western interior. It will consider paintings by artists such as Albert Bierstadt, Emanuel Leutze, and John Gast within the context of the widely disseminated print and material culture of which they were a part. Such images - and the narratives that supported them – typically conveyed the westward journey as a linear itinerary - panoramic in scope and horizontal in format – from right to left and east to west . This paper will also consider the ways that these middle crossings over “empty” lands - already well populated by Native and Hispanic Americans - were conceived and articulated in such panoramic pictures.

Addressing a variety of pictorial works, from images on maps, powder horns, letter sheets, travel guides, and other printed ephemera, to monumental paintings and panoramic murals, this interdisciplinary paper examines the historical moment that led a number of American artists to view the picture plane as a map-like surface upon which to inscribe their images of emigration and travel across the American southwest. It, thus, reexamines nineteenth-century American landscape paintings of the frontier in terms of the visual and political context of cartography.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The broad aim of this paper is to illustrate the value of visual images for the understanding of theoretical concepts. More specifically, my aim is to provide visual representation of the types of social interactions that might give rise to notions about the pre-modern self and the modern self. In order to move in that direction I compare landscape paintings from the 15th and 17th centuries based upon their treatment of nature (landscape) and human figures. I approach the concern with the pre-modern self and the modern self via discussion of the spectator’s read of landscape paintings.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Typical social research models allow an individuals income, job status and other social attributes to vary, but race is often held as constant, a fixed identity. However, for many, especially adolescents, social outcomes and behaviors are not clearly defined by measures of self-identified or ascribed race. Using data from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health I hypothesize that deviation from race typical behavior is a function of social setting and network friendship composition.
Indeed, findings show that for White, Black, Hispanic and Asian students, as friendship racial heterogeneity increases individuals move further way from their race typical behavioral profile or presumed racial identity.
Results also demonstrate that the salience of race fluctuates by individuals across self-identified racial groups. While only one of many social characteristics that influence action, race does have a significant effect on individual sociobehavioral outcomes. In general, these results suggest that, due to the variability of race across social contexts and within social settings, researchers should be cautious when interpreting race effects as simple dichotomous differences.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Even before the ink had dried on the treaty papers granting independence from Britain in 1783, American merchants of all sorts were fitting out ships to sail to China. Indeed colonial Americans—fully attune to the lust for Eastern commodities that had long fueled Western commerce—began imagining their relationship to the Celestial Empire decades before. In the first quarter of the 18th century, a Newport sign painter splashed scenes of China in faux-lacquered hues all over his parlor walls. These astounding chinoiserie wall murals survive today, giving us a rare glimpse of both the fascination and discomfort provoked by the idea of China in early New England. While most of the imagery embedded in the thriving japanning arts of Boston and Newport appear to closely imitate chinoiserie styles of late-17th /early 18th-century Europe, with doll-like figures set in sultry tropical landscapes amidst oversized animals, the Newport murals demonstrate a more serious and original narrative content revealing a genuinely local vision of the powerful and exotic East. In one scene, for example, the Newport painter imaginatively depicts a Chinese despot seated on a plush bed of silk cushions ordering an execution by Turkish saber while wearing a British crown.
This talk and PowerPoint slide presentation dissect the imaginative mélange of Orientalist prejudices conveyed on the Newport wall murals, comparing them to transatlantic chinoiserie imagery appearing on japanned furniture and contextualizing the discussion with period accounts of China appearing in New England. Early national Americans did not just get up one day and sail to China. This presentation seeks to recover the metaphorical and ideological climate within North American seaports that conditioned USAmerican commercial responses to China, including their involvement with the opium trade.