ABSTRACT
It is hardly the case that the history of art was a commonplace in higher educational curricula in the United States in the late nineteenth century. If such a discourse could be said to have taken institutional form at this time, it would be more accurate to look for it in nascent museum and private-collecting patterns, and myriad written examples existing and circulating above and beyond those educational organs more readily associated with the dissemination, or the professing, of the history of art in the present day.1 There was, however, no shortage of publications in the period between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century devoted either periodically or in singular book form to offering American audiences some sense of a history of art for a culture finding its feet as consumers of world-historical artifacts and some sense of their order and significance in relation to an emerging nationalism committed to determining how to locate and situate the American participation in world history.
