Welcome, Michael Brand, director, Art Gallery of NSW and Jennifer Milam, Sydney Intellectual History Network, University of Sydney

Shane White is the Challis Professor of History and an Australian Professorial Fellow in the History Department at the University of Sydney. Nearly 70 years ago now the great novelist Ralph Ellison asked: 'Can a people live and develop for over 300 years simply by reacting?’ He went on: 'Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?’ Bearing this admonition in mind, White will talk about slavery,...

Laura Auricchio is Associate Professor of Art History and Dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies at The New School in New York. ‘American art’ has always been created in a context of international exchange. In the 18th and 19th centuries, much of the art that we now consider American was made by artists who spent many years living and studying in Europe, and whose work was steeped in European traditions. Yet other US-born artists working in the same period set out to develop a...

Jennifer Milam is Professor of Art History and 18th-century Studies at the University of Sydney. In a 4th of July letter written in 1805 to his granddaughter, Thomas Jefferson defined gardening as a fine art, 'not horticulture, but the art of embellishing grounds by fancy…it is nearly allied to landscape painting’. This talk looks at the relationship between landscape painting and garden design in 19th-century America. It considers how nature was perceived as an expression of democratic...

Kate Fullagar is a senior lecturer in modern history at Macquarie University. This paper traces both the broad history and the European representation of Native Americans through the 18th and 19th centuries. Specifically it looks at the rise and fall of two key ‘revolutionary ideas’ in this period. The first is that, far from a tale of destruction or neglect, Europeans in 18th-century North America in fact accommodated indigenous people more often than not. This engagement, however,...