Work Sights
304 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
67 b&w illus.
Paperback
Release Date:11 Dec 2015
ISBN:9781625341952
Work Sights
The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America
SERIES:
Science/Technology/Culture
University of Massachusetts Press
In this extensively illustrated work, Vanessa Meikle Schulman reveals how visual representations of labor, technology, and industry were crucial in shaping the way nineteenth-century Americans understood their nation and its place in the world. Her focus is the period between 1857 and 1887, an era marked by the rapid expansion of rail and telegraph networks, the rise of powerful, centralized corporations, and the creation of specialized facilities for the mechanized production and distribution of products. Through the examination of popular as well as fine art—news illustrations and paintings of American machines, workers, factories, and technical innovations—she illuminates an evolving tension between the perception of technology and industry as rational, logical, and systemic on the one hand and as essentially unknowable, strange, or irrational on the other.
Ranging across the fields of art history, visual studies, the history of technology, and American studies, Work Sights captures both the richness of nineteenth-century American visual culture and the extent to which Americans had begun to perceive their country as a modern nation connected by a web of interlocking technological systems.
Ranging across the fields of art history, visual studies, the history of technology, and American studies, Work Sights captures both the richness of nineteenth-century American visual culture and the extent to which Americans had begun to perceive their country as a modern nation connected by a web of interlocking technological systems.
This is a book that will be of great interest to graduate students and scholars in history, American studies, and art history, as well as more specialized fields like technology and society. In combining a formalist art historical approach with a deeply rooted sense of history, Vanessa Meikle Schulman has produced a work that is in line with the best contemporary scholarship in American nineteenth-century art history.'—Miles Orvell, author of The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community
'In her imaginative study of the nineteenth century visual culture of industry between 1857 and 18887, Venessa Meikle Schulman explicates a wealth of images picturing American technological ingenuity.'—TICCIH Bulletin
'This is a beautifully written, finely illustrated chronicle of the visual representation of US technology during the second half of the 19th century (1850s–80s). Highly recommended.'—Choice
'Schulman does an admirable job of rejecting high/low art binaries privileging canvas paintings that prove all too common in earlier art-historical treatments of nineteenth-century visual culture. This study contributes significantly to our understanding of how popular print culture shaped readers' understanding of America's emerging industrial and managerial era.'—American Periodicals
Vanessa Meikle Schulman is assistant professor of art history at Illinois State University.
