Using Non-Textual Sources provides history students with the theoretical background and skills to interpret non-textual sources. It introduces the full range of non-textual sources used by historians and offers practical guidance on how to interpret them and incorporate them into essays and dissertations. In addition to this, the book posits a theoretical framework that justifies the use of these items as historical sources and explains how they can be used to further understand the past. There is coverage of the creation, production and distribution of non-textual sources; the acquisition of skills to ‘read’ these sources analytically; and the meaning, significance and reliability of these forms of evidence. Using Non-Textual Sources includes a section on interdisciplinary non-textual source work, outlining what historians borrow from disciplines such as art history, archaeology, geography and media studies, as well as a discussion of how to locate these resources online and elsewhere in order to use them in essays and dissertations. Case studies, such as the Tudor religious propaganda painting Edward VI and the Pope, the 1954 John Ford Western The Searchers and the Hereford Mappa Mundi, are employed throughout to illustrate the functions of main source types. Photographs, cartoons, maps, artwork, audio clips, film, places and artifacts are all explored in a text that provides students with a comprehensive, cohesive and practical guide to using non-textual sources.

No abstract

Frederick Law Olmsted's account of his journeys through the southern states, undertaken from 1852-57 reveals that Olmsted, in whom a sense of place was especially strong, characterised enslaved people's relative freedom by place, delineating the plantation (even its slave quarters) as the areas of strictest control while liminal spaces at the edge of plantations, as well as roads, rivers, towns, markets and cities represented places of autonomy. These sites became places of resistance, with Olmsted contrasting his depictions of supposedly docile, naïve, slow-witted slaves on the plantation, with those more articulate, confident and able whom he met on the margins. In revealing the potential of African-Americans to live as free people in the United States, Olmsted reinforced the normalisation of the plantation for slave experience. This chapter will explore examples such as the landscape strategies of southern maroons and Olmsted's slaves' autonomy by road, river and sea.

This article revisits the Atlantic significance of Thomas Gage, by placing his experience in the context of the religious turmoil of the seventeenth century and of stories of other converts from Catholicism, showing that his biographers' judgement of him, as uniquely heinous, is unjustified. Five aspects of his life are explored, illustrating the complexities of his experience and the liminality of his identity. His early life as a Catholic, the renouncing of his faith in 1642, his life as an author, a traveller and a propagandist are discussed, concluding that Gage's hybrid identity was an example of the way that isolated figures in the Anglo-Atlantic world negotiated a safe passage through the religious turmoil of the early Stuart and Civil War eras.

This chapter explores the continuing existence of slavery-like practices within the United States itself and in its sites of imperial interest between the years 1870 and 1939. It also probes the changing ways that chattel slavery has been remembered and memorialized in the United States. It constructs a narrative of the nation’s selective forgetting and obscuring of slavery. The United States worked to sever its present from the past of “our slavery days,” refusing to countenance any continuities. There was also a denial of the persistence of slavery-like labor forms within the United States. This was vocally and actively challenged, resisted, manipulated, and adapted by the African American community and its allies; the chapter also tells this story.