Past Events

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Matthew Brady

    September 16, 2013

    Mathew Brady was one of the most prolific photographers of the 19th century – a master of both the studio portrait and field documentation of the Civil War. In his half-century as an icon of American photography, Brady had many crucial roles in the medium’s development— innovator, entrepreneur, role model, collector, and booster of the form’s artistic potential—but his achievement in the actual making of photographs, before, during, and after the war, should not be overlooked. Using his images to establish Brady as the master of his art form, Robert Wilson draws from his new biography, Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation, to reintroduce the photographs of the single most important American in photography’s first decades. Photos by Brady of members of the Seventh Regiment will also be on display.

    Robert Wilson is the editor of The American Scholar, a former editor of Preservation, the founding literary editor of Civilization (all three of which won National Magazine Awards during his tenure), a former book editor and columnist for USA Today, and a former editor at The Washington Post Book World. His essays, reviews, and fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including American Short Fiction, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Smithsonian, The Washington Post Magazine, and The Wilson Quarterly and on the op-ed, opinion, and bookreview pages of The Boston Globe, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    “I am afraid of this man”

    October 7, 2013

    Pulitzer Prize-winning author T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other individual to create modern capitalism. Commodore Vanderbilt had a troubled but ultimately successful relationship with high society in New York. After years of mutual hostility, the turnabout came with his success in helping to invent the giant corporation. The practice of corporate diplomacy changed his own character to some extent, and the riches he gained allowed him to overshadow the patricians and force his way into their company. His business and social success set the stage for the later Vanderbilt dynasty that came to define the lasting idea of Gilded Age social aristocracy.

    T.J. Stiles is the author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award), and Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, a New York Times Notable Book and a Journalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A past Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, he is currently working on a biography of George Armstrong Custer with the support of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Thomas Nast

    November 4, 2013

    Thomas Nast, the founding father of American political cartooning and a member of the Seventh Regiment, is perhaps best known for his works portraying political parties as the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. Nast’s legacy also includes a trove of other political cartoons, his successful attack on the machine politics of Tammany Hall in 1871, and his wildly popular illustrations of Santa Claus for Harper’s Weekly. Throughout his career, his drawings provided a pointed critique that forced readers to confront the contradictions around them. Fiona Deans Halloran will focus this talk not just on Nast’s political cartoons for Harper’s but also on his place within the complexities of Gilded Age politics and highlight the many contradictions in his own life.

    Fiona Deans Halloran, the author of Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons, teaches American history at Rowland Hall St. Mark’s School in Salt Lake City. She holds a PhD in history from UCLA and has been the recipient of research support from the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, the Huntington Library, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Pre-Raphaelites in Britain and America

    November 18, 2013

    Yale University Professor of Art History Tim Barringer will explore the radical artistic practices of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Britain and its American counterpart, the artists associated with the New York journal The New Path, which was dedicated to the “Advancement of Truth in Art.” The English painters John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti turned their back on academic art-making by returning to what they believed to be the truth and sincerity of early Italian painting. As the movement developed, it embraced a form of hyperrealism influenced by emerging technology. In America, a group of artists including William Trost Richards, John William Hill and Thomas Charles Farrer pioneered a distinctly American variant of Pre-Raphaelite realism, dedicated to the truthful delineation of the flora and landscape of the New World.

    Tim Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). He co-authored American Sublime,and co-edited Art and the British Empire and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. He is currently completing a book, Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock, and is co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate, London 2012, Washington, Moscow and Tokyo 2013).