Material Culture

1111 Chapel Street | Gallery Home | Hours

Anti-Slavery Tokens

The Yale University Art Gallery holds numerous bronze and copper tokens related to slavery and abolition, including this one, which was manufactured in the United States and issued by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1838.

Tags: Antislavery Movements, Material Culture, Nineteenth Century

Ross Archive of African Images

RAAI aspires to reproduce all the illustrations of figurative African objects published between 1800 and 1920 in books, periodicals, catalogues, newspapers, and other publications. It does not include postcards or pamphlets of very limited distribution. More than 95% of the material is contained in the James J. Ross library, the remainder has been recorded from copies in other libraries. Many of the items pertain in some way to slavery or its legacies.

Tags: Africa, Drawings and Images, Material Culture, Nineteenth Century, Religion, Twentieth Century

The Greek Slave

The Greek Slave, by Hiram Powers, was the single most celebrated work of sculpture in nineteenth-century America. Its pose—inspired by the well-known Medici Venus—represents a Christian girl captured by the Turks during the Greek War of Independence, for sale in the slave market of Constantinople. The statue inspired an outpouring of prose and poetry and became an anti-slavery symbol for abolitionists.

Tags: Antislavery Movements, Atlantic World, Material Culture, Nineteenth Century, Slavery, United States

The Yale Guy van Rijn Archive of African Art

The Yale-van Rijn Photographic Archive comprises images of art from Africa south of the Sahara in collections worldwide. Currently there are more than 100,000 images of African art drawn from private and museum collections, dealers, general archives, and the existing body of literature including books, articles, notices, and auction catalogues. The archive may be useful for researchers interested in the impact of slavery on African culture or the evolution of African culture in the Americas. It is available for general research by appointment only.

Tags: Africa, Material Culture, Religion

128 Wall Street | Archives Home | Hours

Katherine Mayo Papers

Correspondence, diaries, writings, photographs, scrapbooks, research materials, and miscellanea documenting the personal life and literary career of Katherine Mayo, an author of several historical and investigative articles, essays, and books from 1896 to 1940. Prior to Mayo’s success as a literary figure she was employed by Oswald Garrison Villard to conduct extensive field research for his biography of John Brown. The collection includes a piece of the rope allegedly used to hang Brown.

Tags: Historiography, Material Culture, Twentieth Century, United States

121 Wall Street | Library Home | Hours

Porcelain Jar Decorated with Two Scenes from Uncle Tom's Cabin

A small porcelain jar decorated with two scenes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Both scenes are variations on illustrations by Hammatt Billings that appeared in the illustrated edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in Boston by John P. Jewett and Company in 1853. Other artifacts relating to the novel include aporcelain statuette and Staffordshire child’s plate.

Tags: Material Culture, Nineteenth Century, Slavery

Randolph Linsly Simpson Collection

The collection documents black life and American racial attitudes from the 1850’s to the 1940’s, and includes about 2500 items, chiefly historical photographs, accompanied by slave manifests, military medals, and civic trophies. The collection includes albumen photographs of Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Photographic formats include daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, and cabinet card photographs.

Tags: Material Culture, Photographs, United States