Deborah Willis, New York University
Eric Foner, Columbia University
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Though both the Union and Confederate armies excluded African American men from their initial calls to arms, many of the men who eventually served were black. Simultaneously, photography culture blossomed—marking the Civil War as the first conflict to be extensively documented through photographs. In The Black Civil War Soldier, Deb Willis explores the crucial role of photography in (re)telling and shaping African American narratives of the Civil War, pulling from a dynamic visual archive that has largely gone unacknowledged. The Black Civil War Soldier offers a kaleidoscopic yet intimate portrait of the African American experience, from the beginning of the Civil War to 1900. Through her multimedia analysis, Willis acutely pinpoints the importance of African American communities in the development and prosecution of the war. The book shows how photography helped construct a national vision of blackness, war, and bondage, while unearthing the hidden histories of these black Civil War soldiers. In combating the erasure of this often overlooked history, Willis asks how these images might offer a more nuanced memory of African-American participation in the Civil War, and in doing so, points to individual and collective struggles for citizenship and remembrance.
https://nyupress.org/9781479809004/the-black-civil-war-soldier/
Speaker Bios
Deborah Willis, PhD, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: "Framing Moments in the KIA," "Migrations and Meanings in Art", "Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” at the International Center of Photography; Out of Fashion Photography; Framing Beauty at the Henry Art Gallery and "Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments" at Indiana University
Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, is one of the most prominent historians in the United States. He is the author or editor of over twenty books. His publications have concentrated on the intersections of intellectual, political and social history and the history of American race relations. Reconstruction, 1863-1877: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988), winner of the Bancroft Prize and Los Angeles Times book prize, along other awards, is regarded as the standard work on the era. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010), was awarded the Bancroft Prize, Pulitzer Prize for History, and the Lincoln Prize. As co-curator of two award-winning historical exhibitions, and through frequent appearances in newspapers and magazines and on radio and television discussion programs, he has also endeavored to bring historical knowledge to a broad public outside the university. His latest book, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, was published in September 2019.
The event will be closed captioned. This event will be recorded and available on our YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/user/IraasColumbia/featured
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