1700-1870: learning resources

The triangle trade and the colonial table, sugar, tea, and slavery

Key points

• The history of sugar stretches from India and the Middle East, where it was first grown, to the New World, where it was cultivated by Christopher Columbus and other Europeans. Until the 16th century, when Europe began importing sugar from the Americas, sugar was reserved for the elite in Europe, because it was both rare and expensive.
• A global trade developed around sugar in the 15th and 16th centuries, bolstered by the growing popularity of tea, coffee, chocolate, and punch in Europe. Its expanded production in the New World depended on the labor of enslaved people, many abducted in Africa, to harvest and process sugar cane. Molasses, a byproduct of sugar production, was an important commodity in the triangle trade.
• When tea imported from China became popular in Europe and the Americas in the 1600s, many of the objects associated with the tea service were inspired by objects also imported from China (in this case, the silver sugar bowl is formed in the shape of a Chinese rice bowl). The sugar itself was part of trade exchanges between Africa, the Americas (and the West Indies), and Europe.
• Both the form and the function of this bowl reflect the elite status of its owner. The use of silver for this bowl reflects the expensive nature of sugar, even in the 18th century; its delicate design suggests that it was the work of a master silversmith.

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Celebrating American enterprise: William Sidney Mount, Bargaining for a Horse

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Dreaming big in The Architect's Dream

Key points

• Commissioned by the architect Ithiel Town to paint a landscape of ancient Athens, Thomas Cole created a fantastical array of ancient architecture. This painting reflects ideal and oversized representations of ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Gothic styles architecture — creating a nostalgia for the glories and character of these lost eras.
• In the nineteenth century, many architects modeled their work on these historical forms creating a series of 19th century revival movements. In particular, American architects drew heavily on ancient Greek and Roman architecture in the design of official and civic buildings, associating their designs with ideals of democracy, strength, and stability.

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Inventing America, Colt's Experimental Pocket Pistol

Key points

• Assembly-line methods of construction and more efficient manufacturing processes, like those developed by Samuel Colt and Elisha Root, shifted the center of the Industrial Revolution from England to the United States in the mid-19th century. These improvements were made possible by new levels of precision in the fabrication of individual components so that they could be mass-produced and fitted together by relatively unskilled laborers.
• The Colt gun was an economic success, not just because of the design innovations and manufacturing advances made, but also because Colt developed new strategies of marketing, selling his guns directly to soldiers on the front lines as well as to foreign governments.
• The advancement from a single-shot firing to a multi-chamber gun made the Colt revolver an important tool in American military campaigns during the 19th century. These guns played a role in the settling of the west and the Gold Rush, the Civil War, the Mexican-American War and were used against Native Americans during the Second Seminole War.

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Heroes of modern surgery, Eakins' Dr. Gross and Dr. Agnew

Key points

• The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 celebrated a century of American independence with a world’s fair that showcased American progress. Thomas Eakins painted The Gross Clinic to demonstrate advances in surgical techniques taking place in Philadelphia. Samuel Gross was then one of the nation’s most famous surgeons. The depiction was considered too graphic to be included in the art exhibition, however, and was instead included in a medical display.

• Dr. Gross and Jefferson Medical College represented a shift in surgical capabilities at a moment of rapid improvements in the scientific understanding of medicine and disease. Eakins depicts some of these advancements in the use of anesthesia and the type of surgery shown, which built on new understandings of bone regeneration. Notably, this painting reflects early skepticism about germ theory in the lack of a sterile environment for the surgery.
• The Agnew Clinic, painted fourteen years later, reflects a new round of innovation, as the operating theater is flooded in artificial light, the doctors are dressed in white gowns and use sterilized tools, and a professional female nurse is included.
• Thomas Eakins was a Realist painter, carefully depicting the material facts of medical care in the nineteenth century (and including his own self-portrait in each painting). At the same time, he used composition and light to portray these surgeons as modern heroes.

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