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The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America
The Republic of Color delves deep into the history of color science in the United States to unearth its origins and examine the scope of its influence on the industrial transformation of turn-of-the-century America.
For a nation in the grip of profound economic, cultural, and demographic crises, the standardization of color became a means of social reform—a way of sculpting the American population into one more amenable to the needs of the emerging industrial order. Delineating color was also a way to characterize the vagaries of human nature, and to create ideal structures through which those humans would act in a newly modern American republic. Michael Rossi’s compelling history goes far beyond the culture of the visual to show readers how the control and regulation of color shaped the social contours of modern America—and redefined the way we see the world.
For a nation in the grip of profound economic, cultural, and demographic crises, the standardization of color became a means of social reform—a way of sculpting the American population into one more amenable to the needs of the emerging industrial order. Delineating color was also a way to characterize the vagaries of human nature, and to create ideal structures through which those humans would act in a newly modern American republic. Michael Rossi’s compelling history goes far beyond the culture of the visual to show readers how the control and regulation of color shaped the social contours of modern America—and redefined the way we see the world.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published August 30, 2019
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About the author
Michael Rossi
2 books1 followerMichael Rossi is a historian of science and medicine at the University of Chicago and the author of The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America, He has written for the London Review of Books, Nature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Cabinet, among other publications. At the University of Chicago, Rossi is a member of the History Department, the Committee on Historical and Conceptual Studies of Science, and the MacLean Center for Medical Ethics. He lives in Chicago and New York.
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June 2, 2020The last bookstore that I was in before the lockdown started was the Seminary Co-op in Chicago, the best academic bookstore in the English-speaking world. Rossi gave a talk on highlights from the book, and I learned a new term from the humanities that hasn't made its way into (analytic) philosophy: the "sensorium". What I found most exciting in this collection of case studies of attempts to wrangle color (tests for color-blindness, standardized color systems, the back and forth between objective and subjective theories of color perception) was the coverage of attempts to reform color language, especially Christine Ladd-Franklin's attempts to bring ordinary color terminology some scientific rigor. And learning about the problems and compromises involved in the creation of the Munsell color system lends weight to skepticism about the ecological validity of color naming experiments that rely exclusively on Munsell color chips.
January 8, 2021
Anyone who's ever been asked the rhetorical question "how would you describe color to someone blind" knows how hard it is to define color. So, it shouldn't be a surprise that there were, historically, a lot of different perspectives on what color was and how it should be defined or measured.
Indeed, by the end of reading this book, what I thought of as the central point---that the ways color was talked about reflected underlying social structures---became seemingly unquestionable, especially through such episodes as the use of racist plantation imagery in a turn-of-the-century American art classroom. Each chapter covers a different theory of color, and in addition to describing it, situates it clearly within the theorist's intellectual project, and historically with regard to other chapters.
Where I had more trouble following the book---quite possibly because I'm not an expert in vision science nor in 19th-century American history---was on relating Rossi's readings to broader consensuses. Although his exposition of Peirce's general theory of signs and logic was one of the clearest introductions to the subject I've ever read, I didn't get a sense of how his reading fits into the broader arguments around Peirce, whose theories I've seen at least four outright conflicting readings of. Likewise, I don't know really anything about modern color theory, and I would have appreciated a broader sense of how the theories described in this text fit into whatever art historians and perceptual psychologists talk about now
Indeed, by the end of reading this book, what I thought of as the central point---that the ways color was talked about reflected underlying social structures---became seemingly unquestionable, especially through such episodes as the use of racist plantation imagery in a turn-of-the-century American art classroom. Each chapter covers a different theory of color, and in addition to describing it, situates it clearly within the theorist's intellectual project, and historically with regard to other chapters.
Where I had more trouble following the book---quite possibly because I'm not an expert in vision science nor in 19th-century American history---was on relating Rossi's readings to broader consensuses. Although his exposition of Peirce's general theory of signs and logic was one of the clearest introductions to the subject I've ever read, I didn't get a sense of how his reading fits into the broader arguments around Peirce, whose theories I've seen at least four outright conflicting readings of. Likewise, I don't know really anything about modern color theory, and I would have appreciated a broader sense of how the theories described in this text fit into whatever art historians and perceptual psychologists talk about now
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews