“You SHOULD…Look at the “Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World” from the New Bedford Whaling Museum

 

With the omnipresence of digital culture, we often tend to think of our society as a predominately visual culture. The 1848 “Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World,” a 1,275-foot-long painting performed as a giant moving scroll, reminds us that visual communication did not begin with the advent of projected photographic images in the late 19th century.

 

You can experience the entirety of this recently restored work online, at https://vimeo.com/36824966. Now part of the collections of the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, this work by Benjamin Russell and Caleb Purrington was performed across the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, part of a burgeoning and popular culture of panorama performance. The moving panorama is an aspect of global traditions of painting and performance with antecedents in Chinese, Indian, Javanese, Persian, and various European cultures. This dynamic, spirited means of telling the important stories of a community–religious, political, social, historical, personal–combines a succession of images with texts and music, allowing audiences to be reached by a multi-media experience.

 

Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, was said to have seen this panorama before he wrote his classic novel about whaling and American life. Like Melville’s book, the New Bedford panorama shows us an epic voyage on a whaling ship from New Bedford south to Cape Horn, and then into the whaling fields of the Pacific. Like Melville’s novel, the panorama is much more than an examination of a profitable extractive industry, showing us as well how Americans viewed the world, other peoples (in Latin America, the Pacific, and along the Northwest coast of North America), and how the United States might be beginning to think of its economic and political role in the modern world.

 

The “Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World” can give us a direct sense of what 19th-century Americans experienced when they attended one of the most popular performance forms of the time.”

 

-Dr. John Bell
Director, Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry
Associate Professor, Dramatic Arts Department

“‘What you should read, see, and hear?’ You should read The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (Oxford University Press, 2017) by political theorist, Christopher J. Lebron, because he reminds us that the philosophical underpinnings of the #BlackLivesMatter movement predate the contemporary movement.  Analyzing the treatment of “Black” people over time, Lebron submits a historical framing of Black political thinkers’, activists,’ and letterpersons’ understandings about Black people’s rights (and the lack, thereof) in American society.  This treatment, Lebron notes, prompted Black Americans’ rhetorical, oratorical, lettered, and physical activism to articulate and assert Black people’s equal humanity, rights, and protection in different eras of American political history. Thus, Lebron outlines the tradition of Black resistance oriented in the long-standing Black freedom struggle to contest racial discrimination and systemic inequality in various forms (in addition to contemporary struggles against police brutality).  Lebron elucidates this longitudinal activism by examining political thought and expressions of Black men and women, such as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Audre Lorde, Anna Julia Cooper, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who establish foundational arguments about Black Americans’ humanity, (in)justice, and liberation for various iterations of “Black,” intersectional identities (class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, for example).”

-Shayla C. Nunnally
Department of Political Science & Africana Studies Institute
University of Connecticut

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-making-of-black-lives-matter-9780190601348?cc=us&lang=en&

 

  

 

 

“Reading C.L.R. James’s brilliant account of the Haitian Revolution could not come at a more appropriate time. Written in 1938, The Black Jacobins remains arguably the most powerful historical narration of a revolutionary struggle that continues fundamentally to affect us today. It traces the history of the army of rebellious slaves in the French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti) as is defeated the imperial armies of France, England, and Spain, finally declaring the independent nation of Haiti in 1804.

 

In the late 18^th century, Saint Domingue was the “Pearl of the Antilles,” the richest colony in the world, the centerpiece of France’s mercantile empire, and the greatest individual market for the transatlantic slave trade—all of this resting on the labor of half a million enslaved men, women, and children. In 1791, inspired by the French Revolution, they revolted under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, who embodied the revolutionary fervor of his people and who forms the central tragic-heroic figure of James’s dramatic narrative. James’s riveting account tracks the tension between the empowering influence of the French Revolution’s call for “liberty, equality, brotherhood” on the slaves, and the slaves’ own agency in driving the Haitian Revolution forward against seemingly insurmountable odds.

 

James’s great insight in The Black Jacobins was to demonstrate the centrality of the Haitian Revolution to any understanding of the imperialist and racist bases of modern capitalism. By tracing how the slaves were first enthused by France’s revolutionary rhetoric, then came into conflict with its commercial and class underpinnings, James probes a structural dynamic of race and class, of freedom of commerce versus freedom of humanity, that continues to impact our own societies today.

 

James wrote The Black Jacobins on the eve of World War II as a defiant call to resisting racism, fascism, and all forms of oppression. Today, eighty years later, the history he recounts of a people who steadfastly claimed their humanity, and the form in which he recounts it, give us potent tools to do the same.”

 

-Robin Greenley,
Associate professor of Art History

 

“You should read In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick

 

If you have ever read or even heard of the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville; if you have ever had an inkling of interest in New England history; or if you have ever wondered about life at sea and what would happen if you were actually ship-wrecked, then you should read In the Heart of the Sea.

 

But why read an historical account of the 1820 whale attack on the whaleship Essex and everything that came afterwards when Melville’s Moby Dick is already a classic? Because, in the words of our very own Mark Twain “truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.”  In the Heart of the Sea tells a story so fantastic, so sensational, that it can only be a work of non-fiction.

 

But that is not what will keep you turning the pages. What will keep you reading into the wee hours of the night is the way Philbrick describes the harrowing events of what followed for four more months after the Essex crew was shipwrecked. Philbrick provides not only a description of the events, but an account of how the sailors – most of whom eventually perished – physically and psychologically responded to their desperate circumstances, from the extreme thirst and hunger brought on by severe dehydration and starvation, to the crippling fear of knowing that the likelihood any of them being rescued was extremely remote.

 

Why read In the Heart of the Sea?  Because, quite simply, as a work of non-fiction, it can fill in the details that the classic novel never could.”

-Katrina Higgins,
Director of Advising