This exploration of popular images of slavery and abolition provides close readings of a range of mid-nineteenth century visual works, including statues, political cartoons, reform illustrations, paintings, and photographic portraits. Examining these diverse sources reveals the complicated ways that images influenced popular understanding about race and equality in the antebellum period, and how visual media were used in the struggle to end slavery.

Images and objects from paintings to wallpaper and almanac prints to furniture served to shape their owners identities in British America before the revolution. This activity assists in deciphering the messages in visual images that convey social status and economic power in the late colonial period.

Family portraits in diverse media from oil paintings to photographs and political cartoons to magazine illustrations examine notions of what it means to be an American between the Civil War and the Gilded Age.

African American visual culture in the 1920s and 1930s was dominated by print media, photography, and public art and conveyed the interrelationship between politics, culture, and citizenship. This activity explores the role of visual evidence in the public debates over civil rights as African Americans struggled to assert their rightful place in the nation.