Books by Peter John Brownlee

In The Commerce of Vision, Peter John Brownlee integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Civil War still occupies a prominent place in the national collective memory. Yet battlefields were not the only landscapes altered by the war. Countless individuals saw their daily lives upended while the entire nation suffered. This book reveals this side of the war as it happened, examining the visual culture of the Northern home front.

Delineating distinctly American characters genre painting was often called upon as a vehicle for expression of cultural nationalism