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Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Hayes Peter Mauro. The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1534–1535, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1534
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Extract
This book explores the centrality of aesthetic transformation to the Americanization process. In the decades after the Civil War, white, middle-class Americans shared a resolve to create culturally acceptable identities for groups they considered to be “other.” Immigrants and African Americans are examined here, but the main focus is on Native Americans, with photographs from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania (1879–1918) presented as “a specific instance of the aesthetics of Americanization at work” (p. 2).
Carlisle's founder, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, enthusiastically recruited the medium of photography to publicize his mission to transform “savage” children from tribes across the United States into “civilized” American citizens. Hayes Peter Mauro's assessment of Carlisle photographs begins with two visually contextualizing chapters that explore the creation of pseudo-scientific images and busts of nonwhite peoples in the era before the school's founding (phrenology charts and diagrams of “The Races of Man” support the written text). The book ends with an analysis of a rear-view nude photograph of Carlisle's Olympic hero, Jim Thorpe, which Mauro uses to illustrate how anthropometrics were enlisted to explain Thorpe's extraordinary sporting prowess. The reader's attention is thus consistently directed toward the vital role played by photography, pseudo-science, and measurement in the presentation of visual evidence to “prove” the existence of hierarchies of race, and many of Mauro's most insightful points develop this theme. The collection of diagrams, charts, photographs, illustrations, and paintings assembled at the back are not mere illustrations but substantiate the visual and intellectual analysis of the text.
