Fashioning Insurrection

From Imperial Resistance To American Orientalisms
✖ an archer dressed in Indian costume fighting British soldiers in red coats.

About the Exhibit

Americans have adapted uniforms into costumes since the masquerade balls of colonial days to today’s historical films and battle reenactments. The practice took an unexpected form in the first decades following the American Revolution when the early presses of the United States closely covered imperial insurrections that unfolded across Islamicate societies against the three towering empires of the era: the Greek War of Independence against the Ottomans (1821–29), the Ottoman Algerian resistance to the French (1830–48), and the Indian uprising against the British (1857). Alongside depictions of these struggles, American popular media paid careful attention to the “national” dress and military uniforms that could potentially unify a revolution or even aid in controlling insurrection. As the young nation navigated its connections to the Islamicate world, some reinterpreted visual and sartorial modes of imperial resistance. The reverberations of these events led to the emergence of orientalist costumes and dress that transformed regional revolutionary garb into American fashion statements of solidarity, fascination, and emulation.
Through these forms of cosmopolitan materialism, Americans announced their political stances on historic movements, sometimes also asserting their country’s imperial ambitions and legacies as it solidified its standing in the world. Such sartorial translations from uniforms to fashion informed America’s evolving relationship with its own revolutionary past. Each medium these costumes inhabited aided Americans in creatively redefining their country’s transforming identity on the international stage while facing resonant issues in their new nation, including foreign trade, slavery, and humanitarianism. Alongside contextualizing documents, the works here vividly illustrate how the U.S. wielded these movements of imperial insurrection to remold its own world image and don it with aplomb.

About the Exhibit
Greek infantry in close combat with Ottomans, more Greeks attacking fortress in left background, boats with troops on river in right, mountains in distance.

The Greeks Under Constantine Botzaris Storm the Fortress of Salona in October 1825 / Die Griechen unter Constantin Bozzaris bestürmen die Festung Salona im October 1825

View original record

Johann Lorenz Rugendas II (artist, 1775–1826)
Aquatint, c. 1825
Brown University Library, Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection


From its invention in the mid-seventeenth century, mezzotints primarily served to translate oil paintings into print. Its distinctive tones derived from tiny pits (rather than lines) in the metal plate, which held ink in darker areas, and were scraped smooth or burnished for brighter areas, giving the prints subtle gradations of light and shade. Printers could produce mezzotints more rapidly and cheaply than line engravings. Therefore, mezzotint became a favorite means to quickly disseminate timely images like recent battles and popular costume studies. Until the mid-nineteenth century, mezzotints acted as early forerunners of the photographic newspaper image. Printer Johann Lorenz Rugendas II became known in his earlier work on the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) for enlisting local artists in an effort to render the most authentic scenes possible before transferring them into mezzotints. To create this print of the storming of Salona, either the printer or his agents similarly recorded decisive battles from the Greek War of Independence as eye-witnesses.