The Hall of Fame for Great Americans provides a window into the cultural changes taking place in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. This book is the first examination of the institutional and social history of America’s first hall of fame, from its dynamic opening in 1901 through its protracted decline in the late twentieth century and its brief return to relevancy in the early twenty-first century.

It also examines in depth what is arguably the least studied project of Stanford White, one of the most distinguished architects of the Gilded Age. Originally designed for New York University’s new campus in the Bronx, the Hall of Fame once housed ninety-eight bronze busts of men and women deemed “great Americans” within its elegant colonnade, including the likes of George Washington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, and Robert E. Lee.

The Hall was conceived when the Great Man theory dominated American thought. However, as times changed, challenges to ideas concerning greatness and heroism grew, and heroes once celebrated were scrutinized for their flaws. The monument is now a shell of its former glory and largely forgotten, and the NYU campus that once housed the colonnade was eventually sold to Bronx Community College.

In 2017, following the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, by white supremacists attempting to prevent the removal of a monument to General Lee, Andrew Cuomo, then governor of New York, thrust the Hall of Fame back into the limelight by ordering the busts of Lee and Stonewall Jackson to be removed. This action joined a national trend to remove monuments deemed offensive. Gerami argues that the rise and fall of this institution mirrors the nation’s changing conception of what comprises a hero. This biography of a public art memorial answers questions about the importance of art history and the cultural evolution of what it means to be great in America.

More than one hundred and fifty years after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still occupies a prominent place in the national collective memory. Paintings and photographs, plays and movies, novels, poetry, and songs portray the war as a battle over the future of slavery, often focusing on Lincoln’s determination to save the Union, or highlighting the brutality of brother fighting brother. Battles and battlefields occupy us, too: Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg all conjure up images of desolate landscapes strewn with war dead. Yet the frontlines were not the only landscapes of the war. Countless civilians saw their daily lives upended while the entire nation suffered.

Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North reveals this side of the war as it happened, comprehensively examining the visual culture of the Northern home front. Through contributions from leading scholars from across the humanities, we discover how the war influenced household economies and the cotton economy; how the absence of young men from the home changed daily life; how war relief work linked home fronts and battle fronts; why Indians on the frontier were pushed out of the riven nation’s consciousness during the war years; and how wartime landscape paintings illuminated the nation’s past, present, and future.

A companion volume to a collaborative exhibition organized by the Newberry Library and the Terra Foundation for American Art, Home Front is the first book to expose the visual culture of a world far removed from the horror of war yet intimately bound to it.

A public art movement initiated by the postrevolutionary state, Mexican muralism has long been admired for its depictions of popular struggle and social justice. Mary K. Coffey revises traditional accounts of Mexican muralism by describing how a radical art movement was transformed into official culture, ultimately becoming a tool of state propaganda. Analyzing the incorporation of mural art into Mexico's most important public museums—the Palace of Fine Arts, the National History Museum, and the National Anthropology Museum—Coffey illuminates the institutionalization of muralism and the political and aesthetic issues it raised. She focuses on the period between 1934, when José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera were commissioned to create murals in the Palace of Fine Arts, through the crisis of state authority in the 1960s. Coffey highlights a reciprocal relationship between Mexico's mural art and its museums. Muralism shaped exhibition practices, which affected the politics, aesthetics, and reception of mural art. Interpreting the iconography of Mexico's murals, she focuses on representations of mestizo identity, the preeminent symbol of postrevolutionary Mexico. Coffey argues that those gendered representations reveal a national culture project more invested in race and gender inequality than in race and class equality.