In his best selling travel memoir The Innocents Abroad Mark Twain punningly refers to the black man who introduces him to Venetian Renaissance painting as a contraband guide a term coined to describe fugitive slaves who assisted Union armies during the Civil War By means of this and similar case studies Paul H D Kaplan documents the ways in which American cultural encounters with Europeand its venerable artistic traditions influenced nineteenth century concepts of race in the United States Americans of the Civil War era were struck by the presence of people of color in European art and society and American artists and authors both black and white adapted and transformed European visual material to respond to the particular struggles over the identity of African Americans Taking up the work of both well and lesser known artists and writers such as the travel writings of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells the paintings of German American Emanuel Leutze the epistolary exchange between John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton newspaper essays written by Frederick Douglass and William J Wilson and the sculpture of freed slave Eugene Warburg Kaplan lays bare how racial attitudes expressed in mid nineteenth century American art were deeply inflected by European traditions By highlighting the contributions people of black African descent made to the fine arts in the United States during this period along with the ways in which they were represented Contraband Guides provides a fresh perspective on the theme of race in Civil War era American art It will appeal to art historians to specialists in African American studies and American studies and to general readers interested in American art and African American history