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 captive narratives circulated as wartime propaganda in the northeastern United States, the American region most involved in Mediterranean trade. This account relates the experiences of Sophia Mazro, a Greek woman taken prisoner with her daughters and enslaved by the Ottomans. The text emphasizes Mazro’s Christian faith in the face of threatening calls for conversion and the humanitarian horrors she endured. Such accounts — ranging from authentic to fictional — were printed to raise funds to support Greek independence against the Ottoman Empire. This volume later features the published letters of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, whose portrait hangs above, as further proof of the atrocities from an American military volunteer and eyewitness. The story’s setting of Missolonghi held significance for the philhellenic movement in Europe and America. The poet Lord Byron died there in 1834. Two years later, the town endured a massacre by the Ottomans, commemorated in Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, an 1826 painting by Eugène Delacroix.

Turkish Barbarity: An Affecting Narrative of the Unparalleled Sufferings of Mrs. Sophia Mazro, a Greek Lady of Missolonghi…

View original record

Mr. Kelch (translator and Greek agent in London)
Bound printed volume with foldout
Providence, Rhode Island: 1828
Brown University Library, Sidney S. Rider Collection on Rhode Island History


Greek captive narratives circulated as wartime propaganda in the northeastern United States, the American region most involved in Mediterranean trade. This account relates the experiences of Sophia Mazro, a Greek woman taken prisoner with her daughters and enslaved by the Ottomans. The text emphasizes Mazro’s Christian faith in the face of threatening calls for conversion and the humanitarian horrors she endured. Such accounts — ranging from authentic to fictional — were printed to raise funds to support Greek independence against the Ottoman Empire. This volume later features the published letters of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, whose portrait hangs above, as further proof of the atrocities from an American military volunteer and eyewitness. The story’s setting of Missolonghi held significance for the philhellenic movement in Europe and America. The poet Lord Byron died there in 1834. Two years later, the town endured a massacre by the Ottomans, commemorated in Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, an 1826 painting by Eugène Delacroix.