The Camera and the Press – Now Available
06/01/2012
The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype Marcy J. Dinius 320 pages | 6 x 9 | 44 illus. Cloth Apr… READ MORE
Tag: Frederick Douglass
Talking Douglass-like about Law–A Guest Blog Post by Jeannine Marie DeLombard
02/22/2012
Overcoming an initial reluctance to “talk ‘lawyer-like’ about law” in his early career as abolitionist orator, author, and editor, the celebrated autodidact drew on “well known rules of legal interpretation” to offer influential commentary on the U.S. Constitution and Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). This legal literacy, combined with a longstanding commitment to gender and racial equality, might have led Douglass to question the wisdom of current efforts to make personhood coterminous with humanness.
Activism After Douglass–a Guest Post by Shawn Leigh Alexander
02/21/2012
This second guest blog post in our series on Frederick Douglass considers his legacy shortly after his death. Shawn Leigh Alexander, author of An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights… READ MORE
Douglass and the Daguerreotype–a Guest Post by Marcy J. Dinius
02/20/2012
In time, Douglass became so interested in the connection between the visual arts, imagination, humanity, and progress toward liberty and justice that he wrote and delivered a set of lectures on the subject between 1861 and 1865. He began both the earlier and the later versions of his “Lecture on Pictures” with an extended consideration of the daguerreotype. After being daguerreotyped multiple times in the 1840s and 1850s, the former slave had become a man in his daguerreian portrait. His lectures suggest that if his audiences were to look at his or any other African American’s image and reflect on its likeness to their own, the daguerreotype would show them the reality of blacks’ humanity and awaken them to their own.
