By Susan Langdon (NHC Fellow, 1999–00) This book explores how art and material culture were used to construct age, gender, and social identity in the Greek Early Iron Age, 1100–700 BC. Coming between the collapse of the Bronze Age palaces and the creation of Archaic city-states, these four centuries witnessed fundamental cultural developments and political … Continued
By James C. Dobbins (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) Images of the Buddha are everywhere—not just in temples but also in museums and homes and online—but what these images mean largely depends on the background and circumstance of those viewing them. In Behold the Buddha, James Dobbins invites readers to imagine how premodern Japanese Buddhists understood and experienced icons … Continued
By Shepard Krech, III (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 1993–94; 2000–01) Before the massive environmental change wrought by the European colonization of the South, hundreds of species of birds filled the region's flyways in immeasurable numbers. Before disease, war, and displacement altered the South's earliest human landscape, Native Americans hunted and ate birds and made tools and … Continued
By Daniel W. Patterson (NHC Fellow, 1997–98) A thousand unique gravestones cluster around old Presbyterian churches in the piedmont of the two Carolinas and in central Pennsylvania. Most are the vulnerable legacy of three generations of the Bigham family, Scotch Irish stonecutters whose workshop near Charlotte created the earliest surviving art of British settlers in … Continued
Visual imagery played a major role in the anti-slavery movement. From the iconic image of a kneeling slave asking “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” to images of family separations through sale at auction, images were an important weapon in the arsenal of abolitionist activity. This seminar looks at some of the imagery … Continued