There is a moment inside “Seeing the News in Harper’s Weekly, 1860 – 80,” the new Georgia Museum of Art exhibition in Athens, when two images stop you cold.
They face each other exactly as they did in the original magazine: Thomas Nast’s “Pardon” on one side, “Franchise” on the other. In “Pardon,” ex-Confederates appeal to a figure representing America. In “Franchise,” an African American war veteran stands before a ballot box, one leg amputated. Together, they form an argument about citizenship rendered in wood-engraved ink, printed for a mass audience in 1865, and still, more than 160 years later, impossible to look away from.
That visitors can see the relationship between the two illustrations the way a 19th-century reader would have is the result of a deliberate curatorial choice made by a group of University of Georgia undergraduates and graduate students who spent a semester doing what history students rarely get to do: handle the actual materials.
Two courses, one exhibition
“Most of the students came to this project without much knowledge of Harper’s Weekly,” said Akela Reason, associate professor of history at UGA and director of the museum studies certificate program, who taught the Hands-on Public History course behind the Georgia Museum of Art show. “They came to a gradual understanding of the journal and its images throughout the course.”
That gradual understanding is, in many ways, the exhibition’s animating idea. The show — on view in the museum’s Study Gallery through July 12, 2026 — grew out of a partnership between Reason’s HIST 4760/6760 class and a parallel course taught by Tricia Miller, deputy director of collections and exhibitions and head registrar at the Georgia Museum of Art. While Reason’s students selected the prints and wrote the accompanying wall labels, Miller’s Museum Registration Methods students did the work most visitors never see — producing condition reports, the detailed physical inventories that establish exactly what shape an artwork is in before it goes on display.
The division of labor was intentional from the start. “Both Dr. Reason and I wanted to use objects from the museum’s collection around which to structure our classroom experiences,” said Miller, who has spent more than 25 years in the behind-the-scenes work of museum registration — proper art handling, careful examination, measuring, condition reporting.
A museum’s two missions
Making that invisible labor visible was part of the point. “I believe museums have two missions,” Miller said. “One is the public-facing exhibition and display mission that engages the visitors with the objects. The other is the behind-the-scenes preservation mission that prepares and protects the objects so that visitors now and generations to come can engage with them.”
And in that sense, the Georgia Museum of Art exhibition shares something with the publication it draws from. Harper’s Weekly was, in its time, a way of making the news visible to people who would never see a battlefield or a congressional chamber. Daily newspapers of the Civil War era rarely published images due to production constraints. Harper’s, with its longer lead time, did. A single copy was estimated to pass between five and 10 readers, meaning the magazine’s reach extended well beyond its paid circulation.
What students found when they looked closely
Reason’s students were interested in that fact — and in the labor involved in producing a weekly illustrated magazine during wartime. To better understand how Harper’s was made, they examined bound volumes at UGA’s Special Collections Libraries and handled the woodblocks used to stamp illustrations directly onto the page.
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The exhibition features work by two artists: Winslow Homer, whose Civil War illustrations became iconic images of the period, and Thomas Nast, best known for establishing the donkey and elephant as symbols for the Democratic and Republican parties. Their illustrations cover Reconstruction, post-war civil rights, segregation and the treatment of ex-Confederates. “The images are incredibly rich,” Reason said, “and in some cases they can be difficult to unpack.” Nast’s partisanship, for instance, extended beyond his support for the Republican Party — his anti-Irish imagery runs through several prints, expressed in visual tropes that contemporary viewers may not immediately recognize.
“Seeing the News” includes a facsimile of a complete issue of Harper’s Weekly that visitors can pick up and read — another choice driven by the students, who wanted visitors to experience the magazine the way a 19th-century reader would have. The issue was chosen specifically because it contains both “Pardon” and “Franchise” facing one another, their relationship visible only when seen as a reader would have seen them: together, in sequence, on the page.
“My hope,” Reason said, “is that my students’ unfolding curiosity throughout the project anticipates the kinds of questions that visitors will bring to the show.”
“Seeing the News in Harper’s Weekly, 1860 – 80” is on view at the Georgia Museum of Art through July 12, 2026.
