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The practice of tableaux vivants, or “living pictures,” involves arranging people and objects into a motionless scene, often re-creating a work of art. After emerging in France, this dramatic art form quickly burst national boundaries, becoming a popular pastime. It took strong root in Russia toward the end of the eighteenth century, traversing the social and political scene, from its debut as an aristocratic parlor game to common street performance; from the inner circles of the tsarist court to agitprop theater and cinema; and from political meetings to public schools and city parades.

In this book, the first English-language history of tableaux vivants in Russia, Yelena Severina traces the development of this art form from the late eighteenth into the early twentieth century. She links its introduction, rise, influence on later entertainments like photography and film, and ultimate decline to concomitant changes in Russian society, politics, and technology, arguing that while this art form may now be nearly forgotten, it should be remembered and studied for its critical role in Imperial Russian culture.

A print-driven history of American art in the long nineteenth century.

Juliet Sperling’s Tactile Sensibilities uses interactive printed objects to uncover culturally instilled ideas about touch’s role in perception and shows how these frameworks were integral to ways of making and appreciating even seemingly untouchable works of painting and sculpture. Crucial to Sperling’s argument is a genre of paper constructions designed to engage the hand and eye in tandem: multilayered and lift-the-flap book plates, pull-tab engravings, foldable playbills, and spinning paper wheels that built expectations of touch as a trained, focused process into their structure and material. Intimately scaled and portable, tactile prints cut across multiple spheres of experience, including spaces in which people learned to view, understand, and create art.

Sperling reverses standard procedures for integrating prints into art history. Rather than working her way outward from canonical artworks toward ephemeral sources within the artist’s orbit, she uses previously unstudied printed materials to open period discourses of tactile sensibility that ultimately lead to art objects, unlocking new meanings behind works of painting and sculpture by artists including Raphaelle Peale, Hiram Powers, William Sidney Mount, and Winslow Homer. In treating sidelined materials as dedicated objects of study in their own right, Tactile Sensibilities reveals that in the long nineteenth century, print was an intellectually dense and powerfully connective medium, vital in mediating the tactile sensibilities that shaped ways of making and appreciating art. 

A study of faith, cultural exchange, and the Alabama missionaries who helped shape the story of Christianity in modern China.

Beginning early in the 19th century, the American missionary movement made slow headway in China. Alabamians became part of that small beachhead. After 1900 both the money and personnel rapidly expanded, peaking in the early 1920s. By the 1930s many American denominations became confused and divided over the appropriateness of the missionary endeavor. Secular American intellectuals began to criticize missionaries as meddling do-gooders trying to impose American Evangelicalism on a proud, ancient culture.

By examining the lives of 47 Alabama missionaries who served in China between 1850 and 1950, Flynt and Berkley reach a different conclusion. Although Alabama missionaries initially fit the negative description of Americans trying to superimpose their own values and beliefs on "heathen," they quickly learned to respect Chinese civilization. The result was a new synthesis, neither entirely southern nor entirely Chinese. Although previous works focus on the failure of Christianity to change China, this book focuses on the degree to which their service in China changed Alabama missionaries. And the change was profound.

In their consideration of 47 missionaries from a single state--their call to missions, preparation for service in China, living, working, contacts back home, cultural clashes, political views, internal conflicts, and gender relations--the authors suggest that the efforts by Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian missionaries from Alabama were not the failure judged by many historians. In fact, the seeds sown in the hundred years before the Communist revolution in 1950 seem to be reaping a rich harvest in the declining years of the 20th century, when the number of Chinese Christians is estimated by some to be as high as one hundred million.
 

The history of the United States is often told as a movement westward, beginning at the Atlantic coast and following farmers across the continent. But cities played an equally important role in the country’s formation. Towns sprung up along the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, as Spaniards and Englishmen took Indian land and converted it into private property. In this reworking of early American history, Mary P. Ryan shows how cities—specifically San Francisco and Baltimore—were essential parties to the creation of the republics of the United States and Mexico.

Baltimore and San Francisco share common roots as early trading centers whose coastal locations immersed them in an international circulation of goods and ideas. Ryan traces their beginnings back to the first human habitation of each area, showing how the juggernaut toward capitalism and nation-building could not commence until Europeans had taken the land for city building. She then recounts how Mexican ayuntamientos and Anglo American city councils pioneered a prescient form of municipal sovereignty that served as both a crucible for democracy and a handmaid of capitalism. Moving into the nineteenth century, Ryan shows how the citizens of Baltimore and San Francisco molded landscape forms associated with the modern city: the gridded downtown, rudimentary streetcar suburbs, and outlying great parks. This history culminates in the era of the Civil War when the economic engines of cities helped forge the East and the West into one nation.

With a common heritage as former colonies of Europe, why did the United States so outstrip Latin America in terms of economic development in the nineteenth century? In this innovative study, Camilla Townsend challenges the traditional view that North Americans succeeded because of better attitudes toward work—the Protestant work ethic—and argues instead that they prospered because of differences in attitudes towards workers that evolved in the colonial era.

Townsend builds her study around workers' lives in two very similar port cities in the 1820s and 1830s. Through the eyes of the young Frederick Douglass in Baltimore, Maryland, and an Indian woman named Ana Yagual in Guayaquil, Ecuador, she shows how differing attitudes towards race and class in North and South America affected local ways of doing business. This empirical research significantly clarifies the relationship between economic culture and racial identity and its long-term effects.

In the early twentieth century, a curriculum known as nature study flourished in major city school systems, streetcar suburbs, small towns, and even rural one-room schools. This object-based approach to learning about the natural world marked the first systematic attempt to introduce science into elementary education, and it came at a time when institutions such as zoos, botanical gardens, natural history museums, and national parks were promoting the idea that direct knowledge of nature would benefit an increasingly urban and industrial nation.

The definitive history of this once pervasive nature study movement, TeachingChildren Science emphasizes the scientific, pedagogical, and social incentives that encouraged primarily women teachers to explore nature in and beyond their classrooms. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt brings to vivid life the instructors and reformers who advanced nature study through on-campus schools, summer programs, textbooks, and public speaking.  Within a generation, this highly successful hands-on approach migrated beyond public schools into summer camps, afterschool activities, and the scouting movement. Although the rich diversity of nature study classes eventually lost ground to increasingly standardized curricula, Kohlstedt locates its legacy in the living plants and animals in classrooms and environmental field trips that remain central parts of science education today.

Addresses the relationships between what modern-day experts say to each other and to their constituencies 

Technical Knowledge in American Culture is an interdisciplinary volume that brings together leading historians to investigate how science, technology, and medicine have shaped—and been shaped by—American intellectual and cultural traditions since the early nineteenth century. Rather than treating science and technology simply as products of social forces, the contributors examine them as forms of knowledge with their own internal logics, debates, and authority structures. The book asks a central question: how do experts—scientists, engineers, physicians—communicate with one another and with broader audiences, and how does that communication influence American society?

The volume is organized into three major sections, each anchored in a distinct historical moment: Part I: The Rise of Democratic Culture, 1800–1870; Part II: The Age of Hierarchy, 1870–1920; and Part III: Toward an Infinity of Dimensions (20th Century). Across its essays, the book argues that technical knowledge is not just a tool of progress—it is a cultural force shaped by communication, interpretation, and authority. By focusing on case studies rather than sweeping narratives, the volume reveals how expertise operates in practice and how it influences broader debates about science, society, and public trust.

A century before the arrival of Stephen F. Austin's colonists, Spanish settlers from Mexico were putting down roots in Texas. From San Antonio de Bexar and La Bahia (Goliad) northeastward to Los Adaes and later Nacogdoches, they formed communities that evolved their own distinct "Tejano" identity.

In Tejano Journey, 1770-1850, Gerald Poyo and other noted borderlands historians track the changes and continuities within Tejano communities during the years in which Texas passed from Spain to Mexico to the Republic of Texas and finally to the United States. The authors show how a complex process of accommodation and resistance—marked at different periods by Tejano insurrections, efforts to work within the political and legal systems, and isolation from the mainstream—characterized these years of changing sovereignty.

While interest in Spanish and Mexican borderlands history has grown tremendously in recent years, the story has never been fully told from the Tejano perspective. This book complements and continues the history begun in Tejano Origins in Eighteenth-Century San Antonio, which Gerald E. Poyo edited with Gilberto M. Hinojosa.

2024 Ewell L. Newman Book Award, American Historical Print Collectors Society
2024 Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research, Texas State Historical Association​
2024 TCU Texas Book Prize, Friends of the TCU Library and the TCU Press
2024 Kempner Family Book Prize—Nonfiction,The Philosophical Society of Texas

A stunning and comprehensive collection of lithographs from 1818 to 1900 Texas.

Westward expansion in the United States was deeply intertwined with the technological revolutions of the nineteenth century, from telegraphy to railroads. Among the most important of these, if often forgotten, was the lithograph. Before photography became a dominant medium, lithography—and later, chromolithography—enabled inexpensive reproduction of color illustrations, transforming journalism and marketing and nurturing, for the first time, a global visual culture. One of the great subjects of the lithography boom was an emerging Euro-American colony in the Americas: Texas.

The most complete collection of its kind—and quite possibly the most complete visual record of nineteenth-century Texas, period—Texas Lithographs is a gateway to the history of the Lone Star State in its most formative period. Ron Tyler assembles works from 1818 to 1900, many created by outsiders and newcomers promoting investment and settlement in Texas. Whether they depict the early French colony of Champ d’Asile, the Republic of Texas, and the war with Mexico, or urban growth, frontier exploration, and the key figures of a nascent Euro-American empire, the images collected here reflect an Eden of opportunity—a fairy-tale dream that remains foundational to Texans’ sense of self and to the world’s sense of Texas.

Literary realism rose to prominence in postbellum America with what the realists heralded as artful and accurate depictions of the world. Realism is thought to have replaced sentimentality—an earlier mode of writing the realists disparaged, which has often been seen as antithetical to realism. Literary scholar Faye Halpern challenges this apparent binary by uncovering how and why William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Charles Chesnutt incorporated sentimental elements into their most famous works.

With its distinctively narratological approach, The Afterlife of Sympathy offers a more rhetorical way to understand sentimentality and assess the ethical complexity of sympathy. Halpern demonstrates how sentimentality enables authors to form intimate relationships between their characters and readers to supplement the critical distance that realist writers otherwise celebrate and that has remained a key value in literary studies today. In reassessing American literary realism, Halpern seeks not only to understand why these writers adopted sentimental techniques but to provide insight into contemporary arguments in literary studies about critical distance and sympathetic identification.

At the end of the eighteenth century, just eighteen colleges existed in the United States, with an average enrollment of fewer than seventy. One hundred years later, over 450 American colleges and universities boasted enrollments up more than one hundredfold. The role of educational institutions in the life of the nation had been utterly transformed.

As the bridge between the two eras, the nineteenth-century college has been among the most controversial subjects in the history of American higher education. While earlier historians portrayed the "old-time" college as an impediment to modernization, later scholars affirmed the broad role of the colleges in the education of the American people.

The American College in the Nineteenth Century combines the best recent scholarship with an interpretive introduction to provide a fresh view of the development of American colleges. The contributors consider these institutions within four new contexts: first, the dramatic transformation in the college students' experience from oppressive discipline to relative freedom; second, the regional variations among the developing American colleges (for example, a South dominated by state colleges, a Midwest by denominational schools); third, the revolution in the century's third quarter as colleges became multipurpose institutions; and fourth, universities that became dominant by the end of the century, incorporating rather than displacing the colleges.

Innovative in its examination of the nature and function of these uniquely American institutions, The American College in the Nineteenth Century is a vital addition to the scholarship of the period.

Contributors: David B. Potts, Leon Jackson, Julie Ann Bubolz, Michael Sugrue, James Findlay, Margaret A. Nash, Peter Dobkin Hall, James Turner, Paul Bernard, and Willard J. Pugh.