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[Here is the third installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies .] Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too! Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney , 1916, by Robert Henri.  Just in case Gertrude Vanderbilt (1875-1942), eldest surviving daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, didn’t seem to have enough of an elite American legacy on which to live, she went ahead and married  Harry Payne Whitney  (1872-1930), son of a famous attorney, grandson of a Standard Oil executive, and heir to a sizeable fortune in his own right. Together the two expanded upon those impressive starting points, inhabiting a New York mansion of their own , becoming prominent raceho...

Heather Cox Richardson I have heard talk of the exportation of modern American art during the Cold War as a means of proselytizing, but I’d never considered the mechanics of that propaganda. It seemed to me a wing of art theory, and while that’s a subject that always entertains me, it’s something for which I have very little brain space during the school year. From Life magazine , August 8, 1949. A recent article by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Independent explains exactly how the CIA promoted American abstract expressionism worldwide in the 1950s and 1960s. Their goal was to highlight the openness and experimentation possible in America’s capitalist system, contrasting it with the rigid conformity of state-censored socialist realism ( some of which , to my Philistinic eye, seems worth looking at even if Soviet state officials thought so, too.) At first, the CIA tried to promote work by Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko at home. Qui...