In American Waters is the catalog of an exhibition co-organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
The exhibition and this associated catalog invite visitors to discover the sea as an expansive way to reflect on American culture and environment, learn how coastal and maritime symbols moved inland across the United States, and question what it means to be “in American waters.” Work by Georgia O’Keeffe, Amy Sherald, Kay WalkingStick, Norman Rockwell, Hale Woodruff, Paul Cadmus, Thomas Hart Benton, Jacob Lawrence, Valerie Hegarty, Stuart Davis, and many others is included, along with essays from scholars, critics, and the curators.
The invention of photography 150 years ago changed profoundly the way we learn about the world. Photographs can make the distant and exotic familiar, and the familiar strange; they can rewrite history, challenge aesthetic notions, and arrest time.
In this volume eight scholars share their insights concerning the impact of photography on their fields, illustrating their essays with a rich and varied selection of photographs from the resources of Harvard, Radcliffe, and the collection of Harrison D. Horblit. The fields range from art history to anthropology to medicine; among the 96 photographs are nineteenth-century views of Florence and Beirut, impressionist landscapes, Civil War battlefield scenes, family portraits, haunting studies of inmates of the mental hospital of Sainte-Anne. As Eugenia Parry Janis says in her introductory essay, photographs of “science, reportage, physiognomy of illness and health, visions of modern cities in war time or of ancient ruins, even a shred of cloth isolated under the camera eye, all increase our learning by utterly removing things from the grasp of actuality…we begin to ponder on all that is known, and how we know it, and what to believe because of it.”
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ivory diptych sundials were widely used to determine the time by day or night. These elaborate portable sundials, which could be adjusted for different latitudes, incorporated various devices useful for merchants and others who traveled extensively in Europe. This catalog illustrates in detail Harvard's collection of eighty-three ivory diptych sundials, one of the largest holdings of these instruments in the world. The collection encompasses a comprehensive array of styles and designs from Nuremberg, Paris, and Dieppe, the major centers of their production, as well as from other parts of Europe.
This catalog is the fourth publication of Harvard University's Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, and the first to appear in twenty-two years. This collection, which was established in 1949 as a resource for the history of science and technology, has one of the three largest university holdings of its kind in the world. It comprises about 15,000 instruments covering a broad range of scientific disciplines dating from 1500 to the present. Illustrated catalogues of other parts of the collection are anticipated in the near future. These will include volumes on early telephones and phonographs, psychological instruments, and apparatus for teaching science in Colonial America.
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