Bio/Description Martha A. Sandweiss Having made singular contributions to Princeton as well as to the field of American cultural history, especially the history of the American West, Martha A. Sandweiss is retiring from the University this spring after teaching in the history department for thirteen years. During her abounding career as curator, museum director, and professor, Marni, as she is known to us all, has blazed trails in interdisciplinary endeavor in several areas, including photography, material culture, the study of slavery and race, and the history of American higher education, above all, Princeton itself. She has also been a strong advocate for and practitioner of public history, helping to make the insight of continuing professional scholarship accessible to the largest possible audience. Throughout, she has excelled at illuminating how the manifold quest for myths has shaped American history and life. Marni has aimed not so much to debunk legends of heroism, identity, and conquest as to show how they came to exist and how they have played out, usually in surprising and contradictory ways. While she deals in large cultural concepts, she is drawn to individual lives, whether they be pioneering landscape photographers, racially ambiguous society big-shots, or morally compromised academics. Always, she approaches these figures not as emblems of an abstraction but as flawed, only partially aware creators of their own lives. It is above all acts of creation, whether of art or of self, that most fascinate Marni, something reflected in her own adventurous creation of a career as scholar, teacher, and citizen. Marni was born and raised in St. Louis where, among many other things, she became an avid fan of the baseball Cardinals, hand-scoring games at age ten with unerring care, signaling an early attachment to crafting as well as preserving the historical record. She received her bachelor of arts at Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude in 1975, majoring in American history and literature. From there she in time moved to Yale University’s history department, where she began work in colonial American history and where she would earn her Ph.D. ten years later. In the interval, a turn of good fortune took her far from New Haven as well as from pre-Revolutionary America. Always interested in the study of material culture, art, and literature, as well as history, Marni earned a National Endowment for the Humanities-Smithsonian Institution research fellowship at the National Portrait Gallery in 1975-76, took an internship with the National Trust for Historical Preservation, and spent 1977-79 as a fellow at Yale’s Center for American Art and Material Culture. Then, in 1979, when the position of curator of photography opened up at the relatively new but already imposing Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, Marni got the job. She was a 25-year-old graduate student, fresh from her general qualifying examinations, when she arrived in Fort Worth — what she would later describe as a leap of faith on her part that was not nearly as great as the leap taken by the museum. Both sides would prove wiser than they could have hoped. During her decade at the Amon Carter, Marni oversaw the maintenance and growth of one of the nation’s premier collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American photographs. The museum’s holdings came to reflect not simply its origins in 1961 as a showcase for American Western art (as in the work of Edward S. Curtis or Ansel Adams) but the breadth of American photography, including major collections of, among other eminences, Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott, and Helen M. Post. In 1986, Marni saw the publication, by the Amon Carter, of what was also her Yale dissertation, the definitive study of the Colorado-born Southwestern photographer Laura Gilpin, one of the most gifted and prolific American photographers of the last century. While at the Amon Carter, Marni either wrote, edited, or co-edited six additional important books on American photography. Although Marni was now a scholar of the American West, Texas could not hold her when another adventure beckoned. Taking up the directorship of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in 1989 was a large opportunity, made even larger because it would mean returning to an academic institution; and Marni’s appointment came with an adjunct professorship at Amherst in fine arts and American studies, which became an associate professorship five years later. In 2000, having concluded her term at the museum and switched to full-time teaching and research, she was named a full professor of American studies and history. In her latest departure, she would bring her expertise in the visual arts fully to bear on current themes in American cultural history. In around 1960, a long-lost group of a dozen daguerreotypes of American troops in the Mexican War, the oldest known photographic images of war, surfaced in a popular used book shop housed in a barn about twenty minutes’ drive from New Haven. Twenty years later, another batch of thirty-eight Mexican War pictures – made, like the first, by unknown daguerreotypists – turned up in another barn, also in Connecticut. From those discoveries, Marni co-authored Eyewitness to War: The Prints and Daguerreotypes of the Mexican War, 1846-1848, published by the Amon Carter in 1989 and quickly hailed as one of the highlights of the sesquicentennial year of photography’s invention. But that was just the beginning, as Marni would in time turn her contribution to that book into the first chapter of her sweeping, deeply influential study, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West, published by Yale University Press in 2002. Print the Legend takes its title taken from the remark (wrongly attributed to the film director John Ford, and widely repeated in mangled form) about what one should print if facts become legend. The book proceeds from the simple but rich observation that the invention and early development of photography occurred at more or less the same time as the settlement by white Americans in the vastness west of the Mississippi. In successive treatments of the photography of mountain vistas, Native Americans, advancing railroads, and more, Marni analyzed not simply how western photographs shaped imaginings of the American future but how those pictures and those imaginings affected the photographic arts. She also meditated on the value of photographs as historical sources, insisting, she wrote, that “pictures tell stories only to the extent that we ask them to; and as our questions change, those stories do as well.” The book received, among other prestigious honors, the Ray Allen Billington Award from the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the William P. Clements Prize from the Western History Association. By the time Princeton’s history department was fortunate to lure her in 2009, Marni was well embarked on a book that pointed in yet another new direction. Clarence King was an exceptionally admired figure in Gilded Age America, renowned, above all, as the geologist who plotted out and mapped the American West. While living in New York, King also fashioned a double life, posing as a Black Pullman porter named James Todd, and marrying a Black woman in Brooklyn, Ada Copeland – a marriage, kept secret from his well-connected friends and family, that lasted until King’s death in 1901; the couple had five children. Marni’s sensitive and nuanced account of his story, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, published by Penguin Random House in 2010, earned accolades from, among others, the National Book Critics Circle and the OAH. At Princeton, Marni immediately made the history department a force in the study of the American West, in her teaching as well as in her tireless professional lecturing and service, which came to include her presidency of the Western History Association in 2018-19. Her determined support of public history would win her, most recently, a Public Scholar’s Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2021-22. But it was with a further adventure — intellectual, institutional, as well as, inevitably, political — that she led the way in changing the face of the University. Building on efforts begun at Brown a decade earlier, Marni in 2013 oversaw a research seminar on Princeton’s connections to the institution of slavery. That undertaking soon evolved into the Princeton & Slavery Project, fully launched in 2017, which aimed not simply to uncover how much Princeton profited, directly and indirectly, from Black enslavement, but to encourage the University to reckon with that past. Although not to this point a specialist in the history of slavery, and although just recently arrived at the University – “I can’t overemphasize how ignorant I was at the beginning,” she later told the Princeton Alumni Weekly – Marni assumed the task of project director with the confidence, scholarly rigor, and public responsibility that were by now her hallmarks. The project’s findings at one level have added sobering dimensions to the University’s history, affirming some impressions and dispelling others. Above all, the project has revealed the extent to which Princeton, like the rest of America, was entangled with the human enormity of slavery. It has also changed how the University presents itself to the world, its idealism about serving all humanity humbled by unlocked evidence about how it came to be all that it is. Now Marni Sandweiss has commenced new adventures, as a valued emerita returning to the Southwest where she started her professional career more than forty years ago, this time to her beloved Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her colleagues at Princeton, although saddened to see her go, await to see where she will turn next in her unending expositions of the American fabric, in its art, its history, and its spirit. Written by members of the Department of History faculty.
