Mobile Americans: Geographic mobility and modernity in U.S. visual culture, 1860-1915

Throughout U.S. history, commentators have claimed Americans\u27 restlessness as an important--even distinctive--national trait. Such assertions gained particular prominence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the growth of transportation networks, increased immigration and urbanization, and rise of an industrial capitalist economy spurred an unprecedented flow of people and goods. This dissertation adapts and expands recent, cross-disciplinary scholarship on the social, political, and ideological significance of geographic mobility in the United States to understand how the visual arts shaped these notions. Specifically, through a diachronic analysis of three case studies, this dissertation examines the ways that genre artists and their audiences turned to representations of geographically mobile subjects to probe the politics of modern life during the period between the Civil War and World War I. ^ Chapter 1 reconsiders genre paintings that Eastman Johnson produced during the 1860s and 1870s in relation to growing concerns about the socioeconomic effects of increased spatial mobility during and after the Civil War. Chapter 2 examines artworks by Thomas Hovenden, Robert Koehler, and John J. Boyle at the 1893 World\u27s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that engaged the Fair\u27s rhetorical linking of Americans\u27 geographic mobility with the United States\u27 recent economic and cultural ascendancy. Chapter 3 turns to work by the Ashcan artists, especially John Sloan, to consider how visual engagement with themes of geographic mobility evolved to suit an urban context at the turn of the twentieth century. Sloan\u27s depictions of urbanites moving through the city explore the social and psychological isolation affecting crowds of daily commuters and the seemingly impenetrable barriers between economic classes, even as rich and poor moved through the city in close proximity to one another. Together, the works studied in this dissertation illuminate how depictions of mobile subjects opened a critical space to explore the shifting social relationships of modern life during a period in which profound political, economic, technological, and demographic transformations seemed to further unsettle a highly mobile American public.