HIST 875

Bodies on Display:  Perspectives on the Body and American Culture in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

John Kasson

The topic that we will consider is: Bodies on Display:  Perspectives on the Body and American Culture in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.  We will explore some of the rich historical materials (verbal and visual) treating aspects of the human body as it has been viewed, exhibited, analyzed, and objectified.  In recent years scholars in a number of fields bearing upon cultural history have created a veritable industry of writings about the body.  We can only sample a small amount of this work, but our readings in both primary and secondary sources promise to be both rewarding in their own right and illuminating of larger issues and methodologies in cultural history.

Topics include: P. T. Barnum and the exhibition of human oddities; skulls, bones, and ethnographic displays; African American performers and blackface minstrelsy”; nonfiction narratives of sensational murders; the body as subject and evidence in photography; manners, emotions, and the regulation of the body;  the female nude in the visual arts; surgery, sexuality, and the body in the world of the painter Thomas Eakins; popular performances of the white male body at the turn of the twentieth century; women and the popular theater; and dance, music, and performance and a machine aesthetic from the turn of the century through the 1930s. 

Students will prepare short critical evaluations of the major reading assignments and design a hypothetical unit extending the themes of the course.  There will not be a blockbuster paper, however.