John Stauffer

"Picturing Frederick Douglass is a work that promises to revolutionize our knowledge of race and photography in nineteenth-century America. Teeming with historical detail, it is filled with surprises, chief among them the fact that neither George Custer nor Walt Whitman, and not even Abraham Lincoln, was the most photographed American of that century. In fact, it was Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) the ex-slave turned leading abolitionist, eloquent...

Revisits the nineteenth century abolitionist movement as the embodiment of a driving force in American history, giving a better understanding of the balance between moral fervor and political responsibility.