Search results
Sep 24, 2019 · An imbalance is detrimental to liberty. If society is too weak, that leads to despotism. But on the other side, if society is too strong, that results in weak states that are unable to protect their citizens.”. From the “Gilgamesh problem” to the “narrow corridor”. Following the English political theorist John Locke, Acemoglu and ...
- Study: Democracy Fosters Economic Growth
As long as democracy has existed, there have been democracy...
- Daron Acemoglu
H e is the author of six books, including New York Times...
- Study: Democracy Fosters Economic Growth
- At the time of the Civil War
- Slaves crossing the battlefield
- A comparison
- Seen firsthand
- White socks?
- From Maine to Dusseldorf
- A sympathetic treatment
Today, Eastman Johnson is most well known for the small genre paintings he completed during the middle of the nineteenth century. In several of these images—Old Kentucky Home–Negro Life in the South (1859) is a good example—Johnson focused on the status of race in the United States right about the time of the American Civil War. If this was the fir...
In A Ride for Liberty, Johnson recreates an event commonly seen during the American Civil War, that of slaves crossing battlefields from the Confederate South to the Union North in order to escape the horrors of their bondage. In this painting, Johnson depicts three African Americans—presumably a family consisting of a father, mother, and small chi...
In addition to the directions of their gazes, the placement of the figures on the canvas has importance. Previous artists often depicted African Americans on the edge of the composition as if to marginalize their importance. William Sidney Mount’s The Power of Music (1847) is but one example. In contrast, Johnson chose instead to focus the composit...
Moreover, Johnson later claimed that this panting was not an artistic flight of fancy, but was instead an accurate rendering of something he saw firsthand. The event he depicted happened on 2 March 1862 on the battlefield in Manassas, Virginia. In the left background, Johnson recreated the Union army, then under the command of General McClellan. As...
On close examination, further details emerge. During the time period surrounding the Civil War, horses were often characterized by the number of “white socks” they had. It was then believed that the fewer the number of white socks, the greater a horse’s value. Indeed, during the middle of the nineteenth century horse traders believed there was a di...
Without doubt, Johnson’s life experiences impacted the subjects he aspired to paint. He was born in Lovell, Maine—a free state, of course—and later moved to Washington, D.C., a locale with both free and slave populations. Johnson’s formal artistic education began at the age of sixteen when he was apprenticed with a Boston lithographer. In 1845, Johnson moved to the nation’s capital and began completing portraits, demonstrating nearly equal skill in chalk, crayon, and charcoal. The fact that Johnson could support himself from his art without extensive formal instruction at such an early age is a profound testament to his innate artistic skill.
Since colonial times, artists from North America have travelled abroad in search of artistic instruction. During the 18th century, for example, American artists traveled to London to study in the studio of Benjamin West. John Vanderlyn broke this trend by travelling to Paris and studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. During the middle of the nineteenth century, however, artists began to travel further east into the continent in search of innovative artistic instruction. In 1849 Johnson joined other international artists in Germany to study at the Düsseldorf Akademie, an institution that specialized in instruction in genre and landscape painting. During his two-year stay in Germany, Johnson became acquainted with Emanuel Leutze, and both painted small genre paintings. After his tenure at the Düsseldorf Akademie, Johnson continued his international studies at The Hague for three years. His deep admiration and emulation of Dutch painters earned him the nickname of “American Rembrandt.”
However, the subject matter of the Dutch Rembrandt and the American Rembrandt were clearly very different. Indeed, Eastman Johnson’s A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves is different from much of the art seen even in antebellum United States. The artistic focus on African Americans during the Civil War was not completely new—Winslow Homer’s art from the early 1860s comes to mind—but Eastman’s sympathetic treatment was relatively rare. Rather than pushing African Americans to the border of the composition, Johnson instead focuses the composition on their plight. In all, this composition forcefully and clearly speaks to the abolition of slavery and the Union cause in the American Civil War. As such, A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slave, maintains a justifiable position in the history of American art.
Essay by Scott Mestan and Dr. Bryan Zygmont
Additional Resources:
This painting in the Brooklyn Museum
American Scenes of Everyday Life in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
Photographs of African Americans during the Civil War at the Library of Congress
Jun 22, 2023 · Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience gives instructors, students, and general readers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of African Americans’ cultural and political history, economic development, artistic expressiveness, and religious and philosophical worldviews in a critical framework. It offers sound interdisciplinary analysis of selected historical and contemporary ...
Jan 10, 2018 · His first book, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981), won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. He has also published Malcolm X: The FBI File (1991) and Martin’s Dream: My Journey and the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2013).
- (3)
- Clayborne Carson, Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Gary Nash
Sep 3, 2007 · This is a book about the history of Westerners' struggle for liberties and rights from the time of the Reformation onward. Grayling covers religious liberties, freedom of inquiry during the scientific revolution, the abolition of slavery, workers' rights, women's rights, changing ideas about democracy, and the more recent notion of universal ...
- (173)
- Hardcover
The African American Struggle for Equality. LEARNING OUTCOMES. By the end of this section, you will be able to: Identify key events in the history of African American civil rights. Explain how the courts, Congress, and the executive branch supported the civil rights movement. Describe the role of grassroots efforts in the civil rights movement.
JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources. Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century Books in the series (28 titles)
