Culture and Containment: Race, Geographic Mobility, and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century America

Movement—who moves, where they move, and how they move—has long been perceived as a racial threat in the United States. To better understand why, Colin Anderson examines how popular culture played a central role in shaping these perceptions during the transformative period of Greater Reconstruction (1845–1900). From sheet music and lithographs to plantation reenactments and Wild West shows, white cultural producers depicted Black and Native mobility as destabilizing. These depictions normal...