Picturing Frederick Douglass
An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century's Most Photographed American
Finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
A landmark and collectible volume—beautifully produced in duotone—that canonizes Frederick Douglass through historic photography.
Commemorating the bicentennial of Frederick Douglass’s birthday and featuring images discovered since its original publication in 2015, this “tour de force” (Library Journal, starred review) reintroduced Frederick Douglass to a twenty-first-century audience. From these pages—which include over 160 photographs of Douglass, as well as his previously unpublished writings and speeches on visual aesthetics—we learn that neither Custer nor Twain, nor even Abraham Lincoln, was the most photographed American of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it was Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave-turned-abolitionist, eloquent orator, and seminal writer, who is canonized here as a leading pioneer in photography and a prescient theorist who believed in…
$47.00
February 27, 2018
John Stauffer is chair and professor of the History of American Civilization at Harvard University and the award-winning author of The Black Hearts of Men and other books on the Civil War era, including Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Picturing Frederick Douglass
Celeste-Marie Bernier, John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, Epilogue by Henry Louis Gates, Afterword by Kenneth B. Morris