Peter Conn- Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians: Painting the Athens of America

Philadelphia’s early national history represented in Thomas Sully’s portraitsThomas Sully is widely regarded as perhaps the most important portrait painter of the antebellum years. Using those portraits, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians: Painting the Athens of America reconstructs many of the people, institutions, and events that combined to make Philadelphia, from the Revolution until the 1840s, at once the most cosmopolitan and most racially embattled city in America. The book approaches Sully’s portraits as visual documents in the history of Philadelphia in the first half of the nineteenth century.About the authorPeter Conn's two most recent books are The American 1930s: a Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Adoption: a Brief Social and Cultural History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Peter has also produced a video course on American Bestsellers for The Teaching Company.