Martha A. Sandweiss began her career as a curator of photographs, later became the director of a college art museum, and now, as professor of history at Princeton University, teaches a broad array of classes in American studies, visual culture, public history, and the history of the American West. She has a deep interest in how historians can use visual images as primary sources to answer a broad range of questions about the past and to convey ideas that cannot be learned by other means. In recent years, she has been exploring an entirely different topic: how one prominent American explorer, geologist, and writer lived a secret double life in late nineteenth-century New York. This exploration of race, class, and identity in America’s largest city has been published in Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (2009).

Lecture topics:

• Print the Legend: Photography and the American West
• Passing Strange: The Secret Life of Clarence King
• Using Pictures as Historical Documents (a workshop)

Viewed Tuesday, February 09, 2010