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Fall 2003 Seminar

"Picturing the Past: Studies in the Visual Representation of History"

Dates: September 2 - December 12, 2003

Faculty

Clay Steinman, Program Director. Communication Studies, Macalester College (Ph.D., New York University).

Paul Solon, Six-month Fellow. History, Macalester College (Ph.D., Brown University).

Description of the seminar

What does history look like? We generally equate history with written texts -- books crafted by scholars working with written sources such as government documents and personal memoirs. But images -- drawings, maps, photographs, movies, television documentaries, and even advertisements -- also shape our view of the past, as source material and as media for representing history. How should a historian make use of a 16th century map or a 19th century Native American drawing? How have those images entered into history? How has the picture of the past we get in a textbook illustration or a Ken Burns documentary or a John Ford western constructed our historical understanding? Given the influence such images have in our media-saturated age, what critical tools do scholars and citizens need so the medium won’t become the message?

Below, right: Sebastian Münster, “Tabula Nouarum insularum quas diuersis respectibus Occidentales & Indiana uocant.” From his Cosmographia universalis. Basle, 1550. Hermon Dunlap Smith Collection. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

The 2003 Newberry Seminar in the Humanities will address these questions by looking at how the past is preserved and represented in maps, book illustrations, drawings, and contemporary media. It aims to help students become aware of how their preconceptions about the past are formed. Through the seminar, students will develop a scholarly understanding of how visual historical representations help mold historical understanding and how, conversely, historical understandings permeate representations and audiences’ expectations of them. The seminar will focus on issues raised by an extensive and varied series of sources, juxtaposing popular and scholarly treatments of historical themes.

We will begin the seminar by immersing ourselves in an array of images from and of the past and then asking traditional historiographical questions. How do visual and verbal texts differ and relate? What is history? How is it depicted? Do the complexities of representing the past make each history but one of many possible histories of the same event? We will engage these questions by reviewing current scholarship in this burgeoning field of inquiry, focusing on three fields rich in both visual representation and controversy and well represented in the Newberry Library collections.

Slavery and Race have been and remain formative and painful issues in history. From antiquity through the United States Civil War and Reconstruction to the post-colonial world, racism and the legacy of slavery continue to be flashpoints both in American society and around the globe. Visual representations have shaped American perceptions of these issues, from slave advertisements and minstrel shows to stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to 20th century films such as The Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, Spartacus, the PBS documentary The Civil War, and the recent film Amistad. What impact do these representations have on how we understand slavery, and on the role race still plays in contemporary society?

In a similar vein, Revolution, from the peasant revolutions of the late Middle Ages to the post-colonial upheavals of our own time, also remains a historically charged topic of contemporary analysis. Here again popular images from lurid 18th century illustrations of the guillotine to film masterpieces such as Jean Renoir’s La Marsallaise and Anton Wadja’s Danton mold our recollection and understanding in ways that compel systematic analysis.

Finally, the idea of the Frontier has dominated American culture from the time of the Puritans to our own, serving as the essential national myth structuring our understanding of American history and culture and shaping policies on land use, international affairs, environmental issues, and relations between immigrant and Native American communities. The Frontier is above all visual as well as physical, appearing in Native American artifacts, colonial maps, Ansel Adams photographs, and John Wayne movies that are each in their own way suitable for historical criticism.

Right: Program for Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West,” Chicago, 1893. Everett P. Graff Collection. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

Over the course of the semester, seminar participants will investigate these historical subjects through reading and encounters with visual materials from the Newberry Library. The Newberry’s outstanding gathering of maps includes the earliest atlas to depict the western hemisphere, colonial land use documents, and an atlas of Native American migration. The Library’s special collections contain a treasure trove of artwork depicting Native American and frontier life. The Library collections also include photographs, sheet music, drawings, and book illustrations that enrich and shape our understanding of history.

This seminar is intended to interest a wide variety of students. It will introduce history students to historiographic questions that are being hotly debated in the field. Art history students will encounter a wide range of visual materials in a unique multidisciplinary setting. Students of literature can investigate the complex intersection of history and fiction. Cultural and media studies students can engage fundamental controversies in their fields about representation and the production and reception of texts.

Although we will be watching and discussing 20th century films and secondary materials in the seminar regularly, an individually designed and conducted research project in the Library’s collections will provide the core activity for each student. The Newberry has a rich vein of still images from the time of Columbus to the First World War that makes it possible to do research in depth on personally selected subjects from many different periods and places. Although it cannot support studies in film history or cinematography, inquiries into how historical images have been incorporated into or adapted for documentary and fiction film would be appropriate. Supported by regular consultations with the seminar faculty, this research will result in a major research paper. At the end of the seminar, students will present their research to their colleagues and to other members of the Library community.