William Sidney Mount Research Articles

The Viewing, and: The Bone Player , William Sidney Mount (American, 1807–1868) Oil on canvas, 1856, and: Running into My Ex-OBGYN at Whole Foods, and: Lightning Bug Ode, and: Em Dash Ode

Abstract: Ploughshares Spring 2024 The Spring 2024 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares "the Triton among minnows." The Spring 2024 Issue, guest-edited by Laila Lalami, features poetry and prose by Mosab Abu Toha, Nathalie Handal, January Gill O'Neil, Farah Abdessamad, Francisco Goldman, Tommy Orange, and more.

A Struggle for Heritage: Archaeology and Civil Rights in a Long Island Community by Christopher N. Matthews (review)

Reviewed by: A Struggle for Heritage: Archaeology and Civil Rights in a Long Island Community by Christopher N. Matthews Katherine Hayes (bio) A Struggle for Heritage: Archaeology and Civil Rights in a Long Island Community by Christopher N. Matthews University Press of Florida, 2020 A STRUGGLE FOR HERITAGE recounts a community-academic partnership grounded in building the case for preservation of a remarkable historic presence for the Native and African American community in Setauket (Long Island, New York). Matthews frames the archaeological work in the project as "archaeology as political action," identifying the preservation legislative system as state-sanctioned recognition and power. Although the community carries a strong sense of their history, elder members are concerned with the literal loss of grounds as younger generations choose not to remain in Setauket. Thus the recognition in preservation is aimed both inward (community persistence) and outward (state power). The prevalent white settler narrative that Matthews refers to as the "authorized heritage discourse" conflicts with the community-preserved history (37). Settler history focuses on the Revolutionary War, and Matthews describes a wide variety of its manifestations: written into local histories, promoted by historical organizations, celebrated in representational artwork, and embedded in landscapes, an ever-familiar story of white settlers' successful struggles for survival while others quietly disappear. In contradistinction to the assertions of disappearance, the next chapter provides a "Counter-map of Setauket" where the same landscape is marked by and mapped with places that Native and African American community members remember as their own deep history. Matthews frames the major inquiry of the book in terms of a shift from "creole synthesis"—in the early New York postemancipation years of greater racial integration—to "racial modernity," a midcentury rising tide of anti-Black racism and antiabolitionist sentiment that transitioned into Jim Crow segregation (105). He uses an eclectic mix of evidence, including an extended analysis of genre paintings by William Sidney Mount, historical newspaper writing, and censuses. Censuses provide neighborhood demographics and demonstrate an initial period of relatively greater integration followed by pronounced racial segregation that concentrated the Native and African American community into one or two areas of Setauket. Census [End Page 200] data guided the selection of the two sites for archaeological excavation and interpretation by the community collaborative partnership. Both were home sites associated with known families and individuals, well contextualized through archival records, photos, oral histories, and personal memories. The goal was to compare the experiences of the historical community over time in the context of changing structures of racism. The following two chapters detail the findings of the excavations and material analyses. The two sites reveal distinct differences, particularly in access to resources and environmental conditions. The nineteenth-century site was home to a multigenerational family who sustained themselves on an independent farm while also drawing on the abundant wild plants and fauna around them. The early twentieth-century site was home to a family pressed into low-wage labor and dependent upon the market for staple foods and materials. Generations beyond emancipation, we see the material evidence of declining opportunities: a strong argument against the tone of a progressive pluralistic society often championed by heritage organizations. While the book impressively outlines a rich history, Matthews closes with a rather pessimistic note about the value of political action via preservation, stating that despite a successful nomination of a historic district to the National Register of Historic Places, little change in the social and racial context of Setauket has occurred. While sympathizing greatly with the community members, this comes as little surprise; and the author's conclusion highlights my concern with the book. Despite the emphasis on the community's diversity and the refusal to essentialize its members, the study and interpretation is grounded in critical Black studies and an analysis of structural racism. What of settler colonialism? Where is the discussion of Indigenous sovereignty and the efforts of the Setalcott Nation in seeking federal recognition? Referencing Native scholars such as Audra Simpson or Glen Coulthard could reframe the recourse to the politics of preservation, showing that preservation practice is fundamentally shaped by settler and white supremacist values and epistemologies. Why would a community, steeped in its own...

Book Review: The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy, by Christopher J. Smith

Book Review: <i>The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy</i>, by Christopher J. Smith

The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy. By Christopher J. Smith . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. - Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery. By Katrina Dyonne Thompson . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy. By Christopher J. Smith . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. - Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery. By Katrina Dyonne Thompson . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. - Volume 11 Issue 4

The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface MinstrelsyChristopher J.Smith. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013.

The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy Christopher J. Smith. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013.The performance of blackface minstrel music and dance on stage in the 1840s in the United States and Britain has a shameful, racist history that fills most of us with such revulsion that it prohibits us from giving serious thought to the African-American origins and sources that prompted the movement that has been described as America's first popular music. Indeed, Christopher J. Smith is one of only a handful of scholars who has taken on this much reviled form of music and dance. Smith's argument in The Creolizalion of American Culture, is that by dismissing minstrel music and dance out-of-hand, we lose not just the degraded, racist form of the performance, but the rich, complex, and deep history of its roots and origins in a multi-ethnic, multiracial, multiclass, and varied geographic milieu. It also takes a scholar of some fortitude to wade through the walls of prejudices, both contemporaneous with the performances and since then, to discover the threads of reality and actual pre-history of the minstrel movement and to try to discover some meaningful and positive lessons from that history, especially as it relates to the ways in which African-American musicians and dancers contributed to the construction and core of what it means to be an American.This book has the weight and heft of superbly researched scholarship that supports a razor-sharp and compelling argument; it is presented in crystal-clear language with confidence and authority. Smith manages to make active use of several different disciplines in weaving his argument, from musicology to art history and visual culture, to anthropology and sociology, to social geography, to dance history and theory, to a close and detailed examination of historical archival and visual materials-all of which are employed with the kind of skill and exacting ability that it leaves the reader breathless.Smith's detailed analysis ranges from broad and widely ranging topics such as analyses of population studies, migration patterns, class studies, living-andmoving social patterns within and among races and classes around the young United States, to localized studies of communities of African American, AngloCeltic and transplanted Caribbean communities in the United States in the cities and towns along the southern and then northern east coast, as well as along the river and canal cultures of the United States. His purpose is to study how music, song, and dance moved, changed, spread, and became creolized as it traveled among the African-American and later to the Anglo-Celtic working class communities of sailors, canal workers, and laborers of New York City's Lower East side.Yet the book also includes an incredibly focused investigation into the life and work of the artist William Sidney Mount. Smith makes extensive use of Mount's written papers and more especially his paintings and drawings of musicians and dancers to reveal a wholly new side of Mount as a person and artist, particularly with regard to his professional interest in both music and dance. …

The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy

The Creolization of American Culture examines the artworks, letters, sketchbooks, music collection, and biography of the painter William Sidney Mount (1807-1868) as a lens through which to see the multiethnic antebellum world that gave birth to blackface minstrelsy. As a young man living in the multiethnic working-class community of New York's Lower East Side, Mount took part in the black-white musical interchange his paintings depict. An avid musician and tune collector as well as an artist, he was the among the first to depict vernacular fiddlers, banjo players, and dancers precisely and sympathetically. His close observations and meticulous renderings provide rich evidence of performance techniques and class-inflected paths of musical apprenticeship that connected white and black practitioners. Looking closely at the bodies and instruments Mount depicts in his paintings as well as other ephemera, Christopher J. Smith traces the performance practices of African American and Anglo-European music-and-dance traditions while recovering the sounds of that world. Further, Smith uses Mount's depictions of black and white music-making to open up fresh perspectives on cross-ethnic cultural transference in Northern and urban contexts, showing how rivers, waterfronts, and other sites of interracial interaction shaped musical practices by transporting musical culture from the South to the North and back. The Africanization of Anglo-Celtic tunes created minstrelsy's musical creole synthesis, a body of melodic and rhythmic vocabularies, repertoires, tunes, and musical techniques that became the foundation of American popular music. Reading Mount's renderings of black and white musicians against a background of historical sites and practices of cross-racial interaction, Smith offers a sophisticated interrogation and reinterpretation of minstrelsy, significantly broadening historical views of black-white musical exchange.

Christopher J. Smith, The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy

Scholarship of blackface minstrelsy in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries has primarily sought to complicate entrenched perceptions of the entertainment form. A range of existing scholarly accounts including those by Eric Lott (1995), Dale Cockrell (1997), W. T. Lhamon (1998), and William Mahar (1999) have laid the groundwork for the growing re-evaluation of minstrelsy’s history. Christopher J. Smith clearly seeks to continue this trend in The Creolization of American Culture...

The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy by Christopher J. Smith (review)

The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy by Christopher J. Smith (review)

The creolization of American culture: William Sidney Mount and the roots of blackface minstrelsy

The creolization of American culture: William Sidney Mount and the roots of blackface minstrelsy

The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy by Christopher J. Smith

664 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy. By Christopher J. Smith, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2013, 352 pages, $45.00 Cloth. Reviewed by T.J. Vaughan, Aurora University In contemporary society the mere subject of blackface frequently provokes abhorrent disgust and thoughts of racism. However, as British novelist L.P. Hartley once wrote “[t]he past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” In this important new work, Christopher J. Smith reminds us that what is true today was not always the case. Smith examines the roots of what became known as blackface minstrelsy, and he positions its origins as a cultural exchange that involved musical styles and performers from various racial and ethnic groups coalescing into what became the first example of a distinctly American popular music. Smith describes this musical fusion as “creolization.” He develops and supports his thesis primarily through the work of antebellum New York painter and musician William Sidney Mount, who was a contemporary observer and recorder of this musical phenomenon. Smith argues that minstrelsy did not spontaneously arrive in 1843 with the emergence of the Virginia Minstrels, as other historians have often asserted. Rather, the Virginia Minstrels transferred this emerging popular music from New York City’s streets to its working class theaters. In this process, performers shifted from being primarily multiracial and multicultural to whites masquerading as black. Although racial conflict obviously existed at the time, African American and white working class musicians came together to play and also construct this new popular music. However, the presence of these performers in theaters that catered to middle and upper class whites would have been too socially threatening, so white performers donned black make-up and attempted to duplicate the music they had heard. Smith shows that the first blackface performers were familiar with the musical genre and its musicians and respected their work. Smith’s study, however, focuses on the era prior to the rise of the Virginia Minstrels as he traces the roots of this music. Here, he finds areas in which diverse groups of performers intersected. This was often on the Book Reviews 665 docks where working class white immigrants brought their Celtic musical traditions and African American workers brought their African and Caribbean influenced styles. Through the shared experience of music, something unique developed that was influenced by existing styles, but was new. This music began to spread via maritime and riverine routes as performers , often dock workers, day laborers and sailors, moved to where they could find work. Additionally, in New York this music was performed on the streets and at festivals such as Pinkster and Negro ‘Lection Day where the coming together of black and white musicians was considered less of a threat to existing social order. William Sidney Mount was from an artistic family and moved between the Lower East Side and Long Island. Although he made his living primarily as a portrait artist, his most important works often prominently feature African American musicians. Mount was musically inclined, playing the flute and fiddle. Making extensive use of Mount’s papers and sketches, as well as his paintings, Smith reveals a world in which musicians, black and white, creatively inspired each other. By using Mount’s visual iconography as the basis for much of his argument , Smith builds upon existing minstrelsy scholarship. These works include sketches that were always drawn from life and also a series of Mount’s paintings that depict musicians posing or performing. Based upon these images, Smith argues that these works provide visual evidence of the creolization of merged musical forms and influences. According to Smith, Mount depicts white performers using techniques typically associated with black players. Based on the ethnochoreographic evidence of musicians and dancers in Mount’s drawings and paintings, Smith takes what might at first be considered to be tenuous support and makes a compelling and convincing argument. Most of Mount’s work was spent painting from real life in and around his home in Stony Brook, New York. He was not trained in Europe nor did his work reflect a European style. His style is generally...

After an imaginary slumber: visual and verbal imagery of ‘awakening’ Africa

After an imaginary slumber: visual and verbal imagery of ‘awakening’ Africa

The “Negro Touch” and the “Yankee Trick”: William Sidney Mount and the Art of Race and Ethnicity

This article addresses the role of antebellum American genre painter William Sidney Mount (1807–1868) in developing and examining the image of the Yankee as a racialized figure in American art and culture. Mount's popular works helped create the image of the Yankee—the farmer in Long Island Farmer Husking Corn (1833–1834) even appeared on money throughout the young country. As his career evolved, Mount, who also regularly included African Americans in his works, began to investigate the interconnections between black and white identities and even to propose the possibility that blacks could themselves become Yankees.

The View from Outside

This essay considers Norman Rockwell's Shuffleton's Barbershop, first published on the cover of a 1950 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, as a meditation on the structuring presence of race in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s. After examining the connection between Shuffleton's Barbershop and William Sidney Mount's 1847 painting The Power of Music (a connection that has been made by scholars before me, though in different terms), I examine why this link makes sense to a discussion of race and Rockwell's art from a century later. Framing this discussion within a consideration of the Post's policies, literary and visual tropes for dealing with race, and the culture of Vermont, where Rockwell lived and made Shuffleton's Barbershop, I then suggest how such a reading might impact our understanding of the illustrator's art as a whole. Only as something gestational, not yet fully formed–either as part of the artist's or his culture's consciousness–could the black body find a place in Rockwell's pictorial community in 1950. And still, the effect it has on his art is profound. In Shuffleton's Barbershop, the black presence decenters the Rockwellian idiom, throwing it just slightly out of its usual alignment to acknowledge in some strange way how skewed the idiom was to begin with.

William Sidney Mount's The Power of Music

William Sidney Mount's <i>The Power of Music</i>

Paint for the Many? Rereading William Sidney Mount's The Painter's Triumph

The Painter's Triumph, created by William Sidney Mount in 1838, has long been interpreted as an icon of the democratization of American art (Figure 1). Nearly every scholarly analysis of the painting frames it in the context of Mount's well-known charge to himself, “Paint pictures that will take with the public, in other words, never paint for the few, but for the many.” The farmer's enthusiastic involvement in the artist's work is viewed as emblematic of Mount's commitment to promoting the visual arts among ordinary folk. The painter's “triumph,” most assert, is his ability to reach the common man. This is certainly an appealing message and consistent with the desire to see mid-19th-century American artists as resolute democrats in tune with Jacksonian cultural reforms. Yet, Mount never called it The Painter's Triumph, referring to it only as “artist showing his work,” and there is no evidence that viewers in the late 1830s and early 1840s recognized a particularly democratic message. The current title first appeared in a catalogue in 1847, long after Mount sold the painting and two years after the death of Edward L. Carey, the man who commissioned it. Despite the 1847 title change, in his later autobiographical sketch Mount referred to the painting as “Artist showing his own work.”

William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life

“William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life.” Co-organized by the Museums at Stony Brook, 1208 Rt. 25A, Stony Brook, NY 11790 and the American Federation of Arts, 41 E. 65th St., New York, NY 10021 Get access Karl Kusserow Karl Kusserow Cranbury, New jersey Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 1, June 2000, Pages 172–177, https://doi.org/10.2307/2567922 Published: 01 June 2000

A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America

Despite its widespread popularity in antebellum America, phrenology has rarely been taken seriously as a cultural phenomenon. Charles Colbert seeks to redress this neglect by demonstrating the important contributions the theory made to artistic developments in the period. He goes on to reveal the links between the tenets of phrenology and the cultural ideals of Jacksonian democracy. As Colbert demonstrates, virtually every important figure of the American Renaissance expressed some opinion of phrenology, whether or not they embraced it. Its proponents included many artists eager to support a cause that enhanced the status of their profession by endowing the human form with extraordinary significance. Colbert reviews the careers of Hiram Powers, William Sidney Mount, Harriet Hosmer, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas Cole, among others, in light of their responses to phrenology. Powers's Greek Slave , for example, can be seen as a model of the physical and moral perfection available to those who adopted the phrenological program, a series of dictates on everything from diet to mental and physical exercise. By creating portraits, genre scenes, ideal figures, and even landscapes that embodied the theory's teachings, Colbert shows, artists endeavored to enlist their audience in a crusade that would transform the nation. Originally published in 1997. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

William Sidney Mount: painter of American life

William Sidney Mount: painter of American life

Who's Sitting at the Table?: William Sidney Mount's After Dinner 1834

Who's Sitting at the Table?: William Sidney Mount's After Dinner 1834

"Fair Exchange No Robbery": William Sidney Mount's Commentary on Modern Times

"Fair Exchange No Robbery": William Sidney Mount's Commentary on Modern Times