City of Second Sight (eBook)

Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture

Justin T. Clark (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
292 Seiten
The University of North Carolina Press (Verlag)
978-1-4696-3874-4 (ISBN)

Infos

In the decades before the U.S. Civil War, the city of Boston evolved from a dilapidated, haphazardly planned, and architecturally stagnant provincial town into a booming and visually impressive metropolis. In an effort to remake Boston into the "e;Athens of America,"e; neighborhoods were leveled, streets straightened, and an ambitious set of architectural ordinances enacted. However, even as residents reveled in a vibrant new landscape of landmark buildings, art galleries, parks, and bustling streets, the social and sensory upheaval of city life also gave rise to a widespread fascination with the unseen. Focusing his analysis between 1820 and 1860, Justin T. Clark traces how the effort to impose moral and social order on the city also inspired manyfrom Transcendentalists to clairvoyants and amateur artiststo seek out more ethereal visions of the infinite and ideal beyond the gilded paintings and glimmering storefronts.By elucidating the reciprocal influence of two of the most important developments in nineteenth-century American culturethe spectacular city and visionary cultureClark demonstrates how the nineteenth-century city is not only the birthplace of modern spectacle but also a battleground for the freedom and autonomy of the spectator.

Autor

Justin T. Clark is assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Produkt-Details

• Zusatzinfo: 29 figs., 2 maps
• Verlagsort: Chapel Hill
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 160 x 160 mm
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Geowissenschaften ► Geografie / Kartografie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Empirische Sozialforschung
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Architektur
• Schlagworte: antebellum built environment • antebellum urban spectacle • ART • art exhibition culture in nineteenth-century Boston • blind autobiography • Boston Athenaeum • class in antebellum Boston • cultural politics in Boston • fairy theatricals • Federalist intellectuals • history of antebellum Boston • intellectual origins of the middle class • Lorena Brackett • magnetic clairvoyance in the United States • mesmerism in the United States • monuments in nineteenth-century Boston • New England Spiritualism • nineteenth-century amateur art • Nineteenth-century American visual culture • public culture in the nineteenth-century United States • Scottish realism in the United States • social history of Transcendentalism • spirit-drawing • Unitarianism in American culture • urban transformation in antebellum United States • visionary culture in the antebellum United States • Washington Allston
• ISBN-10: 1-4696-3874-6 / 1469638746
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4696-3874-4 / 9781469638744