NEWEST COURSE

(as of 2024)

Black Lives Matter in Print & Pictures

(a Book Studies & Book History course)

This course explores how, throughout U.S. history, Black people – and their allies – have relied on pictures and print material to fight for their freedom, civil rights, and survival. They will contextualize and analyze texts produced in relation to specific campaigns or events, including: abolitionism, anti-lynching crusades, civil rights and Black Power movements, welfare rights protests, and Black Lives Matter. In addition to learning how to analyze pictures as both images and primary sources, students will draw on book studies practices, which treat books as objects, the physicality of which hold clues to the past. The “books” of this course include newspapers, slave narratives, pamphlets, magazines, photographs, and even iPhone videos. Whenever possible, we will do hands-on analysis, using materials in Wellesley’s special collections and from the instructor’s archive. Students will learn to read visuals and print objects for evidence of Black people’s circumstances and resources, and for how existing materials and technologies enabled and limited Black freedom demands.