It’s a place to find insightful analysis of early American history as it is discussed in scholarly literature, as it manifests on the evening news, as it is curated in museums, big and small as it is performed in documentary and dramatic films and as it shows up in everyday life. It is for all sorts of people to read about all sorts of things relating to early American life-from architecture to literature, from politics to parlor manners.
A bit less formal than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine, Commonplace speaks-and listens-to scholars, museum curators, teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in American history before 1900. Welcome to Commonplace, a destination for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. This article originally appeared in issue 13.4 (Summer, 2013). In a forthcoming essay in the journal MELUS, I provide a more extended close reading of Elizabeth Keckley’s memoir in relation to this famous image. Wallace, Pictures and Progress and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, N.C., 2012) and Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (Philadelphia, 2012). See, in particular, Shawn Michelle Smith and Maurice O. Recent scholarship on the importance of African American contributions to and commentary on nineteenth-century visual culture have revitalized the study of our national visual past. Neely, The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (New York, 1984). For more on the images of Lincoln circulated through popular prints, see Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Kunhardt, Jr., Lincoln, Life-Size (New York, 2009). The variety of changes introduced to the image in its reproductions offers a fascinating glimpse into how iconography produces narratives and fantasies about national history, culture, and values.įor more on photographic depictions of President Lincoln, see Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf, Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of All Known Poses (Norman, Okla., 1963), James Mellon, The Face of Lincoln (New York, 1979), and Philip B. Only after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 did the image become ubiquitous.
This image of the president and his son, however, soon to become one of the most popular and most reproduced depictions of Lincoln, was not published or otherwise publicly distributed until a year after its completion. For example, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln that was taken on this day was used as the basis for the image that appears on the five-dollar bill. This particular sitting led to a number of images that have become part of U.S. The photograph was commissioned by the painter Francis Carpenter, who was at the time working in the White House preparing sketches that would serve as the basis for his First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln (1864). It shows the president and his son looking at a photograph album (a prop that was lying around the studio) together. This photograph of Abraham Lincoln and his son Thomas (Tad) was taken by Anthony Berger in Mathew Brady’s Washington, D.C.
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