Photograph Title: Alfred Jackson in his cabin at the Hermitage Property (Davidson, TN) ca. 1900, Tennessee State Library and Archives

Around 1900, a formerly enslaved man named Alfred Jackson posed for a portrait in his home. Built in 1841, the structure was one of several slave cabins located on the grounds of the Hermitage, former president Andrew Jackson’s family plantation in Davidson, Tennessee. The photograph is evocative, revealing layers of history around Alfred, his family, his home, and his time. His pose and self-fashioning, his dwelling, his furniture and textiles, provide windows into better understanding these layers, but doing so requires moving beyond the traditional methodologies often employed by historians of the written archive.

This experimental session invites a multidisciplinary group of scholars to use Jackson’s portrait as a point of departure for discussing the how and why of doing history outside texts. Each scholar will present an eight-minute, visually rich, presentation that invites the audience to examine the photograph and its many revelations through a variety of methodologies: archaeology, art history, material culture, visual culture, and more. These presentations will reveal how approaching familiar histories of slavery and its legacies, the Jim Crow South, and African American history through unconventional sources can offer new information, but also raise new questions and routes of further inquiry.

We will then open up a more explicit discussion of these methods, particularly what visual and material sources can (and cannot) offer to historians. What are the limitations of thinking with objects and images? What kinds of expertise might historians need to develop in order to become skilled readers of unconventional archives? How can historians incorporate these sources into their teaching? In addition, as historians of all times and places continue to grapple with the deeply incomplete, opaque, and even violent nature of the archive, this session will encourage broader conversation about research and writing for our discipline.

This session opens up a conversation with historians who work with visual and material evidence in any region or period; historians interested in research methods; historians invested in innovative pedagogy; and scholars working in US History, Southern History, Histories of Slavery, African American History, and beyond.