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american studies

Image of the Week: Battle of Chattanooga

Image of the Week: Battle of Chattanooga

This chromolithograph, produced in 1880, depicts the 1863 Chattanooga Campaign of the Civil War.  After a series of successful attacks led by U.S. Grant on November 23-24, the Federals would hold the “Gateway to the Lower South” until the end of the War.  For more Civil War artwork, check out the Library of Congress Civil [...]

Image of the Week: Baseball

Now that football season is officially over, we can look forward to enjoying America’s pastime.  In honor of African American History Month, here’s a photograph of Morris Brown College’s baseball team, circa 1899 or 1900.  Courtesy of the Daniel Murray Collection from the Library of Congress.

Image of the Week: Whittier’s study

From the Pageant of America collection at the New York Public Library, NINES offers this glimpse into the study of Fireside Poet John Greenleaf Whittier, and the “Desk upon which Snow-Bound and other poems were written.”

Image + text: the Gettysburg Address

  To accompany this week’s image, NINES Fellow Elizabeth Fox assembled all five copies of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address into one comparison set in Juxta Commons and collated them to see how they differ.  Use the embed window below to peruse a heat map of this collation, with the Nicolay Copy as the base text. [...]

Image of the Week: American Heritage

Image of the Week: American Heritage

After hearing an NPR interview on Columbus Day with Timothy Egan, author of Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, I decided to share a particularly striking example of Curtis’ work.  Curtis’ portraits, taken at the beginning of the twentieth century, document and commemorate the lives and [...]

Image of the Week: Ad for Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress

John Bunyan’s allegorical narrative, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is To Come (1678) was an extraordinarily popular work of religious literature, even through the nineteenth century. This advertisement from the Library of Congress’ American Time Capsule Collection, invites visitors to see a panoramic exhibition of the famous religious narrative, and promises [...]

Image of the Week: Honest old Abe on the Stump

In honor of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, this week, we’ve chosen to showcase this satirical drawing of Abraham Lincoln after his nomination as a Republican presidential candidate in 1860. According to the summary provided by the Library of Congress, The artist contrasts Lincoln’s modest posture at the Illinois Republican state convention in [...]

Image of the Week: “Banner of the Third United States Colored Troops”

During the American Civil War, the United States Army assembled regiments of African-American troops to help in the fight against the Confederacy. This week’s image shows a banner from one of these regiments, with the motto, “Rather Die Freeman Than Live To Be Slaves.” (NYPL – African American History Collection)