Peter Conn will be discussing his new APS Press book: Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians: Painting the Athens of America. Thomas Sully is widely regarded as perhaps the most important portrait painter of the antebellum years. Using those portraits, Thomas Sully’sPhiladelphians: Painting the Athens of America reconstructs many of the people, institutions, and events that combined to make Philadelphia, from the Revolution until the 1840s, at once the most cosmopolitan and most racially embattled city in America. The book approaches Sully’s portraits as visual documents in the history of Philadelphia in the first half of the 19th century.Drawing upon wide research, including previously unpublished archival material, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians brings to life the men and women who were making the history of early national Philadelphia
Peter Conn retired from Penn as Vartan Gregorian Professor of English and Professor of Education, and was a member of the graduate groups in the history of art and American civilization, a member of the urban studies and Asian-American studies faculties, and an affiliated member of the Center for East Asian Studies. His publications include The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917 (Cambridge University Press, 1983; paperback editions, 1988 and 2008), and Literature in America (Cambridge University Press, 1989), which was a main selection of Associated Book Clubs (UK). Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, 1996; Paperback 1998), was chosen as a "New York Times Notable Book," was listed among the best 25 books of 1996 by Publishers Weekly and among the best books of the year by Library Journal, was included among the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle award in biography, and received the Athenaeum Award.