NEW IN PRINT — Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the 19th Century

Aston Gonzalez.

Material Culture — History and Culture.

“The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in visual technologies—daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes de visite, and steam printing presses—enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for black rights. In this book, Aston Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they helped build the world they envisioned. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics during the nineteenth century.”

Paperback, 324 pages, 36 halftones — The University of North Carolina Press — September 2020 — $29.95. Available at UNC Press.