How do we remember the Civil War? In this final post I would like briefly to consider the visual images that are attached to our memories of the war—and to think about the multiple ways in which memory and history can diverge. Those of us who teach the Civil War from textbooks in our classrooms know that historians have come to a basic consensus: The Civil War was ultimately caused by slavery, that national crime enacted in our Constitution; Reconstruction was in many ways a failure, because freedmen and freedwomen were left with “nothing but freedom,” in historian Eric Foner’s words. But if these are some of the agreed-upon lessons of the war—articulated with passionate urgency as early as 1903 by W. E. B. Du Bois in his great The Souls of Black Folk—they are not necessarily the lessons we see in our visual landscape of the war.

Figure 1. Title card, D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915).

As Luciano D’Orazio noted in one of his posts, one of the most powerful visual evocations of the war in the early twentieth century was D. W. Griffith’s 1915 landmark film, The Birth of a Nation. A retelling of the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction from the point of view of “The Lost Cause”—a belief in Southern righteousness on the one hand, and Northern aggression and corruption on the other—The Birth of a Nation built upon the dominant national (not just sectional) interpretation of the war at that time. Virulently racist in its imagery, supporting the idea that slavery had been a “benign” institution in American life, picturing African American legislators as ignorant and degraded, and celebrating the birth of the Ku Klux Klan as a way to “protect” the South (Figure 1), The Birth of a Nation reminds us that the “emancipationist” memory of the war, to use historian David Blight’s helpful term, had been virtually eliminated from our national memory by the time the film was released.

Figure 2. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915).

It can be a powerful teaching tool to compare Griffith’s pernicious images of African American legislators (Figure 2 left)—shoeless, ill-dressed, putting bare feet up on their desks—with actual images from Reconstruction, such as the composite photograph (Figure 3 below) of dignified “Radical members of the First Legislature after the War,” in South Carolina (1878).

Figure 3. “Radical Members of the First Legislature after the War,” in South Carolina (1878). Library of Congress.

As many historians have pointed out, although the North won the war, by the turn of the century the South had in many ways won the battle for the memory of the war. Thus, history and memory radically diverged. On this point, see, for example, Joan Waugh’s U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (Chapel Hill, 2009), a wonderful new study of the eclipse in Ulysses S. Grant’s reputation in the early twentieth century.

The Lost Cause interpretation of the war only gained more traction with the 1939 film Gone with the Wind—still arguably the dominant way in which most people envision the war and Reconstruction (I would be interested in your thoughts on this point). As Kirk Savage has previously posted in the Slavery forum on this website, Gone with the Wind visually reinforced the pernicious idea of the “faithful slave”—the slave who preferred slavery to freedom. Change in film representations came slowly. Glory (1989) presented a welcome post-Civil Rights Movement view of the Civil War, with its study of the 54th Massachusetts, an African American regiment. But have recent films entirely dislodged The Lost Cause view of Gone with the Wind, in your view?

A few final thoughts: There is no question that studying the shifting visual imagery of the war can be a powerful tool for our students: after all, visual imagery can be a form of propaganda; far from somehow being separate from politics, it can be a way of practicing politics. We of course see this clearly in the political cartoons of a Thomas Nast—but paintings and monuments and films, too, have their underlying political messages.

Visual silences can be a powerful form of propaganda, too—that is, what isn’t represented in the visual landscape of Civil War memory, as well as what is. Some of us can look around our cities and towns and find monuments to Civil War soldiers and generals; the landscape of memory clearly privileged white soldiers. (See Kirk Savage’s new Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape [Berkeley, 2009] for a superb discussion of changes in the “language” of monuments.)

Until very recently, virtually the only Civil War monument that pictured African American participation in the war was Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ beautiful 1897 Shaw memorial in Boston (Figure 4). (But even here, of course, the monument enshrines the idea of racial hierarchy as the white officer, Robert Gould Shaw, sits on horseback leading black troops of the 54th Massachusetts.)

Figure 4. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment.

Today, “Underground Railroad” monuments have been created around the country that offer an alternate version of Civil War memory, focused on slavery and African American agency. Some of these are controversial, however, as communities attempt to claim the existence of an Underground Railroad where there is sometimes little evidence one existed. Some have argued that such monuments act as a denial of racism in nineteenth-century communities, providing instead the pleasant fantasy that all citizens wanted to help in ending slavery.

To conclude: after the Civil War ended, how was it remembered visually? And how were those visual memories—in paintings, monuments, illustrations, TV shows, films—related to changing ideas of freedom and equality in American life? What are today’s most prominent visual memories of the Civil War, and where are they located? In museums? Monuments? Films? TV shows? Or perhaps re-enactments—a set of “living” visual images? How do such images help or hinder our attempts to teach the Civil War?

Finally, I want to consider what happens if we expand our ideas of the war beyond battles and battlefields, beyond leaders and generals, recognizing that the Civil War was a wider social event that took place over many years—not only the years on the battlefields from 1861 to 1865. With that in mind, and recognizing my own “silence” in this forum regarding representations of women and war, I want to close with the great Winslow Homer 1876 painting The Cotton Pickers (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Winslow Homer, The Cotton Pickers. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

I hope you will suggest your own ideas for teaching the visual history of the memory of the Civil War, and look forward to our final discussion together.

So far we have talked of the ways in which the Civil War disrupted standard assumptions of how war should look; and also have examined a few of the most popular sentimental images of the war, including a sentimental image of Emancipation. In this post I will consider representations of African American soldiers during the war.

The recruitment of African American soldiers was one of the most revolutionary developments of the Civil War—second only to Emancipation in creating a new relationship between African Americans and the nation. But recruitment also created challenges to accustomed modes of visual representation. Before the war, degraded and demeaning images of African Americans held sway in popular magazines such as Harper’s Weekly. Cartoon images of African Americans were often drawn from such sources as blackface minstrelsy, with its staged depictions of “Zip Coon” and “Jim Crow.” Portrayals of African Americans within abolitionist literature were more sympathetic, but they tended to emphasize that slaves were helpless victims: the most popular abolitionist image, reproduced in countless engravings and medallions, was the kneeling slave in chains, hands clasped in supplication, looking upward. That representation of the slave was even replicated in the 1876 “Emancipation Monument” in Washington, D.C. (See Kirk Savage’s forum on Slavery on this website for thoughtful commentary on, as well as examples of, these images.)

With the active recruitment of African American soldiers beginning in late 1862, periodicals that prided themselves on being aligned with the North’s wartime goals needed to shift their representational stance. Could helpless victims fight the war? Could degraded “Zip Coons” fight the war? Propagandistic arguments that African American men should fight the war needed to be accompanied by illustrations that they could fight the war. Harper’s Weekly and other popular magazines, like Frank Leslie’s, began to change their images of African American men.

Let us start with a few recruiting posters (Figures 1, 2 and 3) aimed at African American men during the war. I include these here because these were revolutionary broadsides within American history—but also because we sometimes forget that forms of print (like these broadsides) are themselves images. The historian Peter Fritzsche, for example, has talked about our urban immersion in “word cities;” we are all surrounded by a world of printed signs that are part of our visual universe. Words can be images, in short.

Figure 1. Recruiting Poster, 1863. Civil War Treasures of the New-York Historical Society, Library of Congress.

Figure 2. Recruiting Poster, 1863. Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780s-1917, Record Group 94. National Archives.

Figure 3. Recruiting Broadside, 1863. Massachusetts Historical Society.

Recruiting posters can be of special interest in the classroom. What words are emphasized in the following broadsides? How do they attempt to appeal to African American men? How do they combine rhetorical appeals with visual appeals? I’m sure you can think of additional questions we can ask our students about these signs.

Figure 4. "Teaching the Negro Recruits the Use of the Minie Rifle," Harper’s Weekly, March 14, 1863.

By early 1863, popular magazines like Harper’s Weekly directly engaged the question of whether African American men would make good soldiers in their illustrations. In the March 14, 1863 illustration “Teaching the Negro Recruits the Use of the Minie Rifle” (Figure 4), for instance, we see that black soldiers are depicted as earnest, almost-“upright” men—there is relatively little of the crude racial stereotyping or the hunched-over postures found in earlier depictions. At the same time, however, it’s hard to miss the prominent role of the white officer in “showing the way” here: notice his completely upright stance, as well, in contrast to the African American men he leads. This is hardly a visual evocation of equality, but instead a reiteration of African American dependence on white guidance.

The idea that former slaves might become soldiers fascinated a Northern white audience: beginning in 1863 there were several “before-and-after” images of slaves who had become soldiers in popular magazines. The Harper’s Weekly image of “A Typical Negro” below (Figure 5) is interesting for many reasons—not the least being the visual emphasis given to the central panel, which the text tells us is a depiction of “the surgical examination previous to being mustered into the service.” That examination revealed “the negro Gordon’s” (no first name was given) “back furrowed and scarred with the traces of a whipping.” As Kirk Savage has pointed out, such “transformation” images allowed a double consciousness of African American men as both slave and free—always rooted in the past as well as the present. What’s more, Gordon’s bared back gives white viewers the same power over African American bodies that had held true in slave auctions. In other words, this “before and after” image does not really complete a transformation—yet another way in which illustrations themselves denied full equality to African American men.

Figure 5. “A Typical Negro,” Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1863.

Figure 6. Two Brothers in Arms. Library of Congress

Figure 7. Seated black soldier with pistol and jacket. Library of Congress.

The rare daguerreotypes below allow us to see the ways in which African American soldiers themselves interacted with the conventions of photography. The first two photographs (Figures 6 and 7, most likely taken during the war, but possibly just after) offer a direct gaze to the viewer that we almost never see in magazine illustrations of African American soldiers. Such a direct gaze was always associated with an assumption of manliness and a claim to manhood in Civil War-era culture. The second daguerreotype, of course, is striking because of the pistol—a material indication of seriousness of purpose in battle.

Figure 8. Sergeant-Major Lewis Douglass, 54th Mass. Infantry, 1863. Moorland-Spingarn Research Ctr., Howard Univ.

In the third daguerreotype (Figure 8 right), taken during the war, Lewis Douglass, son of Frederick Douglass, assumes an upright, manly pose—not dissimilar to the pose of the white officer in the Harper’s Weekly illustration “Teaching Negro Recruits. There are no comparably manly poses for African American soldiers as individuals in Harper’s Weekly,  however.

Finally, it is good to remember that even as Northern illustrators began to depict African American men in new ways during the war, they by no means relinquished older racist stereotypes. Indeed, the weekly cartoons run by Harper’s Weekly (Figure 9 below) often relied on pernicious racial stereotyping, including “Sambo” images.

Figure 9. “Is All Dem Yankees Dat’s Passing?,” Harper’s Weekly, January 7, 1865.

As we think about the ways in which the Civil War transformed and shaped how white Northerners envisioned African American participation in American life, we should remember that older stereotypes continued to influence depictions of African Americans. By the end of the century, such older stereotypes had in fact virtually replaced the new imagery of African American manhood to be found in Civil War illustrations.

How revolutionary was the Civil War, then, in changing our visual map of American society? Which soldiers were granted full manhood in visual culture, and which were not? What are the political, social, and cultural reasons why some images gain prominence in American life, and others disappear from our visual consciousness? These are a few of the questions we can ask our students as they use Civil War illustrations to understand the impact of the war on American life. I will be curious to hear your own ideas for using Civil War illustrations and images.

In this second part of our forum, I’d like us to consider a few widely-circulated popular images during the Civil War that allow us to think about prevailing cultural beliefs at the time. I will be concentrating entirely on the Union here.

The Civil War was, of course, a “home front” war—one in which battle front and home front were tightly linked in a number of ways. Early in the war, for instance, before the government had been able to organize sufficient war support, the supplies provided by those on the home front (in the form of uniforms and foodstuffs, for instance), were in fact vital to the fighting of the war. But of course in addition to providing supplies early in the war, those on the home front were expected to provide material support in the form of people—soldiers.

At a time of intense localism—most Americans had never traveled far beyond their own communities, after all, and at the start of the war people said the United States “are,” not “is”—the idea that families should “give” their sons to the abstract entity of the nation created a number of ideological problems. How to justify sending men far away in order to kill? How could families be made to accept the loss of their sons and husbands and brothers?

A vast propagandistic literature during the war addressed these concerns—but so, too, images worked to address the fundamental paradox of the war: that families needed to sacrifice what was most precious to them in order to save the Union. The first image here, The Soldier’s Dream of Home (Figure 1), was a popular 1862 Currier & Ives print that imagined an unbroken link between soldier and home.

Figure 1. "The Soldier’s Dream of Home," Currier & Ives, 1862.

At a time when sentimental domesticity was a prevailing mode of thought, the image reassured the viewer that soldiers had not become killers, but instead remained connected to their homes: we see a soldier asleep on the ground in camp, an envelope containing a letter from home next to him, while in the “bubble” at the top of the print we see his dream, a joyful reunion with his wife and child. The image at once reassures the viewer that soldiers have not fundamentally changed, and provides a narrative “happy ending” to the war within the dream itself. You will no doubt find additional meanings within the “narrative” of this print.

So popular was this visual idea—that the soldier was dreaming of home (as of course many soldiers were), that it was even expressed in printed envelopes, which became patriotic collectors’ items early in the war (the fad died down by 1863). The envelope below (Figure 2), depicting a Zouave (Zouaves were soldiers identifiable by their colorful uniforms) asleep on the ground, offers a variation of the Currier & Ives print in its design.

Figure 2. "The Soldier’s Dream of Home," Envelope Collection, New-York Historical Society.

How do we discuss such images with our students? In my view, such images allow us to ask questions about the universal vs. the particular in understanding experiences of war. Do these images portray a different domestic experience of war than we are familiar with today? Or do they instead speak to a universal experience of war? Images can be extraordinarily useful in teaching Civil War history: they simultaneously closely link us to the past while also creating a disquieting sense of “otherness” through style and mode of expression. I would be interested in your thoughts on this point, and how you help your students to engage with the past without deciding that either the past is “just like today” or, on the other hand, that the past is so foreign that it has no relationship at all to their present lives.

These are clearly sentimental images—and as sentimentalism has emerged as an interesting topic within the comments on this forum, it is well worth remembering that the Civil War occurred during a period of popular sentimentalism, with many popular authors writing of the importance of heart and home, and of relationships that expressed and valued emotion. Indeed, the emotive domesticity of the Civil War era—the intense emphasis on the importance of home—would not be matched again until the 1950s, with its own version of Cold War domesticity. Figure 3 below is a wonderful sentimental image, a two-page illustration by Thomas Nast from a January 1863 Harper’s Weekly, that again emphasizes the tight links between home front and battle front. By this time in the war, Harper’s Weekly was reaching hundreds of thousands of readers; its fast-increasing circulation had everything to do with its multiple illustrations, which allowed Americans to visualize the war.

Figure 3. Thomas Nast, "Christmas Eve," Harpers Weekly, January 3, 1863.

Notable about this image is not only the tender connection made visually between husband and wife, who face each other (and note once again that the soldier is reading a letter from home), but also the complex messages given by the smaller images in the four corners. On the upper left, Santa Claus is about to go down the chimney of the home where the wife kneels praying; on the upper right, Santa Claus distributes presents to eager soldiers in camp. These are cheerful, playful images, to be sure. But on the lower left and lower right, battles on land and sea are depicted; and in the middle of the image on the bottom, fresh graves are a sober reminder of wartime death, giving  the image a serious cast. As with many Thomas Nast images, there are undercurrents and shadows here.

If sentimental domesticity was an important means of imagining soldiers far from home, it was also an important way of visualizing Emancipation, as the January 1863 Harper’s Weekly illustration by Thomas Nast (Figure 4) reveals. In emphasizing the domestic, Nast of course drew upon a long abolitionist literary tradition protesting against slaves’ disrupted family and home life—expressed not only in slave narratives but also in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Figure 4. Thomas Nast, "The Emancipation of the Negroes, January, 1863—The Past and the Future," Harper’s Weekly, January 24, 1863.

With complex “story” illustrations of this kind, Harper’s Weekly often felt compelled to provide a written narrative explaining the illustration. I include part of that explanation below because it can be interesting to think about what is not encompassed by such description. The meanings of images, after all, often “spill over” beyond the boundaries of such prose.

In the centre of the picture is a negro’s free and happy home. Here domestic peace and comfort reign supreme, the reward of faithful labor, undertaken with the blissful knowledge that at last its benefit belongs to the laborer only, and that all his honest earnings are to be appropriated as he may see fit to the object he has most at heart—his children’s advancement and education.

On the wall hangs a portrait of President Lincoln, whom the family can not sufficiently admire and revere. They regard him with feelings akin to veneration, and in each heart there is honest love and gratitude for him. Near this is a banjo, their favorite musical instrument, a source of never-ending enjoyment and recreation.

At the top of the picture the Goddess of Liberty appropriately figures. The slaves have often heard of her before, but have rather regarded her as a myth. Underneath is old Father Time, holding a little child (the New Year), who is striking off the chains of the bondman and setting him at liberty forever.

On the left are incidents of everyday occurrence in slave life; and, in happy contrast, on the right we see some of the inevitable results of freedom and civilization.

There is more to this description from Harper’s Weekly—but nothing more about the family circle that is at the center of the image. There are several questions for students to be posed about that central grouping: how realistic is such a Victorian scene in depicting the comforts of home for newly-freed slaves? How realistic is the family grouping in the aftermath of slavery? Why does the prose mention the husband but not the wife? Why has Nast chosen to depict Emancipation in this sentimental way for his Northern, primarily white, audience? There are many more questions beyond these, of course. I would be interested in your own responses to this image.

To conclude: sentimentalism was an important mode of visually rendering the war. We moderns have a tendency to dismiss sentimentalism (as overwrought, overemotional, etc.). But in approaching the Civil War, we should understand that sentimentalism did not just obfuscate the “reality” of war: it was itself a reality of feeling and thought for Americans at the time.

Next time, we will discuss some distinctly non-sentimental imagery of the war.

The Civil War was the first war in American history to be illustrated as it occurred—not just through the extraordinary engraved images in the immensely popular Harper’s Weekly, but through widely-distributed Currier & Ives prints; illustrated envelopes (a fad early in the war); illustrated sheet music; pamphlets; cheap “yellow-backed” literature; novels; children’s books; “souvenir” cards; magazines; broadsheets; and even games. When we approach the Civil War, in fact, we are suddenly in a world of startling visual abundance—as anyone can attest who types the phrase “Civil War images” into a Google search and then tries to make sense of the plethora of images  available on a multitude of websites.

Of course in the list above I have left out one central source of Civil War imagery: photographs. But certainly it is Civil War photographs that are at the center of our imaginative encounters with the war. Who has not been haunted by a Mathew Brady photograph of bodies on the battlefield? Who has not peered closely at a daguerreotype of a soldier, searching for meaning in the oddly intimate contact with a young man long since dead? Who has not explored the extraordinary careworn face of President Lincoln as he visibly aged in photographs taken during the war?

In this first post of our November forum on the Civil War, I would like to consider the use of photographs during the war—and then explore our own uses of such photographs in the classroom, inviting you to share your own experiences and ideas. In subsequent posts I will explore not only photographs but a variety of other types of Civil War images produced during and immediately after the war—and along the way will pay attention to both white women and African American men and women, along with soldiers. Finally, in a post late in the month (Happy Thanksgiving!), we will also think about the use of film to teach about the Civil War—from D. W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation (1915) to Gone with the Wind (1939) to Glory (1989).

Before we discuss photographs themselves, let us start with the expectations—both North and South—that people living at the time of the war had concerning how war would look when it began in 1861. Both Northerners and Southerners inherited a set of visual beliefs about war derived from a long tradition of battle paintings and prints: they believed that it would be heroic, involving gallant charges by sword-waving officers; that it would be orderly; that it would be both stirring and even beautiful (!) in ways that could easily be represented in images. We get some sense of these early, naïve expectations of war (many people later could not believe how little they had anticipated the brutal nature of modern warfare) when we look at the ways in which the war was represented in 1862—before the fiercest fighting of the war had taken place and shaken Americans’ comfortable assumptions. Take a look, for instance, at the Currier & Ives print “The Battle of Williamsburg, Va., May 5th 1862” (Figure 1)—not one of the major battles of the war, although the print does its best to convince you otherwise. This print is available at the Civil War images webpage, part of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division’s “Pictorial Americana” website.   It is a site well worth exploring on your own.

Figure 1. “The Battle of Williamsburg, Va., May 5th, 1862,” Currier & Ives, New York, 1862. Library of Congress.

As we can see in this print, the battle dead have artistically managed to arrange themselves in sinuous lines at the bottom right and left of the print, allowing a rounded “frame” to form that highlights the stern general on horseback motioning his men forward.    Swords are raised; flags are flying artistically; the general himself is in a completely stiff and unnatural pose, apparently with little interest in (or worry about) the Confederate Army directly in front of him. There is none of the confusion, the smoke, the lack of visibility that Stephen Crane would later render in fiction and which many veterans felt was the first “real” rendering of the war. This stirring—and completely unrealistic—scene was replicated in dozens of battle lithographs and prints, including numerous such scenes by Winslow Homer for Harper’s Weekly (see, for example, the July 5, 1862 engraving based on a Homer drawing, “The War for the Union, 1862—A Cavalry Charge”).

Figure 2. “General N. B. McLaughlin and Staff, near Washington, D.C., July, 1865." Library of Congress.

Photographs, by contrast, introduced a war that could not be contained by artistic convention—though many photographers certainly tried. As Alan Trachtenberg reminds us in his wonderful essay “Albums of War” (a chapter in his 1989 Reading American Photographs), Civil War photographers were themselves influenced by conventions of genre painting and drawing: their tendency, for instance, was to arrange generals and officers in stiff groups in front of tents for photographs—careful groupings that remind one of numerous traditional engravings and paintings. In Figure 2, for instance, “General N. B. McLaughlin and Staff, near Washington, D.C., July, 1865” (taken a few months after the war ended but before the army had been disbanded), we see a highly conventional arrangement of officers sitting in front of a tent for a group photograph.

There were dozens—hundreds—of such conventional groupings photographed during the war, such as Figure 3, “General George Stoneman and staff, near Richmond, Va., June 1862.”

Figure 3. “General George Stoneman and staff, near Richmond, Va., June 1862." Library of Congress.

Yet even when we look at these stiff, arranged, non-battlefield photographs, we tend to feel that something has slipped beyond the photographer’s attempt to control the image of the war—something has spilled over that is mysterious to us and catches us up as viewers. We note, of course, that in both photographs African American men (no doubt servants to these officers) are seated on the ground—in both cases, surprisingly, with a dog. Who are these men? Are they “contrabands” (the word used during the war to signify slaves who achieved freedom by entering Union lines)? If so, they certainly did not find equality when they entered Union lines: these photographs give us a vivid sense of visually-enforced racial hierarchy within the Union army.

Figure 4. “Tent Life of the 31st Pennsylvania Regiment.” Library of Congress.

Other photographs of camp scenes are equally evocative. Take, for instance, Figure 4, “Tent Life of the 31st Pennsylvania Regiment.” Here we seem to be face to face with the messy “reality” of camp life, with a soldier’s entire family (at least we assume it is his family) with him in camp. We seem to have caught something spontaneous—which we moderns tend to privilege as more “real” than conventionally-arranged photographs. But on closer inspection we can see that this photograph, too, includes artificial arrangements. Take a look, for instance, at the lower left of the photograph, where a spoon and a plate are carefully propped against a cooking pot on the ground. There is no reason for this arrangement except to display the items that a soldier has with him in camp—perhaps this is the hidden subtext of the photograph? Yet if the photographer’s intention is to show what belongings one soldier has with him in camp, the photograph also has a great deal of “extra” information to convey. Once again we wonder about the lives of the woman, the children, and the African American man we glimpse just at the back of the tent on the right. It is not a glorious scene; it is not a heroic scene; we sense that we have come close to the ordinary soldier’s experience of the Civil War. But as viewers we have as many questions as answers here.

Figure 5. "Group of contraband at Follers House, Cumberland Landing, Va., May, 1862." Library of Congress.

Finally, let us look at one last carefully-arranged group photograph before turning to the battlefield. Figure 5, “Group of Contraband at Follers House, Cumberland Landing, Va., May, 1862,” is notable for its arrangement as well; note, for instance, the two men lying down in front, probably under instructions from the photographer, as their pose imitates the physical arrangement of conventional collegiate photographs of the day. But what is most striking here are the expressions of the African American “contrabands”—the uncompromising stares they give to the camera, but whose meanings we cannot possibly fully know.

Even the most artificially-arranged Civil War photographs, in other words, offer us the pedagogic gift of curiosity. We can explain to our students that we cannot possibly know everything we would like to about the people in these photographs—and we can sharpen their historical awareness by asking them to consider what they would like to know, what particular questions they have about these obscure lives, relationships, and wartime experiences. Such questions not only fire imaginations but can lead to useful research tasks. Civil war photographs, in short—and not just the most famous, but photographs such as these I have been discussing—can allow  students to engage deeply with the social history of the war. I have found in the past that a successful assignment can involve class presentation by students of Civil War photographs they have unearthed on the Web—with research attached to make as much sense of the photograph as possible. I would be curious to hear about your own experiences teaching the visual Civil War.

When we turn to photographs of battles, we of course find nothing at all like the Currier & Ives print with which I began this post.   Indeed, as Alan Trachtenberg points out in “Albums of War,” we do not really find battles at all in photographs—we instead find “preparations and aftermaths, the scene but not the event.” This has to do in part with the nature of warfare—after all, battles were not necessarily predictable events at which a photographer could set up a tripod (although photographers approached the first battle of the war, Bull Run, in exactly that spirit). But the dearth of battle photographs also has to do with the state of photography itself at the time of the Civil War: it entailed cumbersome equipment and involved a wet-plate process that “required that the camera be planted, the lens focused, the plate coated, exposed, and developed while still wet, all within precious moments at the scene of the ‘view’ to be made” (Trachtenberg, 72). Thus when we explore the battlefield we see many views—but not the battle itself.

But we do see the aftermath of battle. Among the most famous “views” of the battlefield war, of course, were those of the bodies left on the field. Here, for instance, is a representation of the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam titled “Bodies of Confederate Dead Gathered for Burial”:

Figure 6. “Bodies of Confederate Dead Gathered for Burial” (Antietam). Library of Congress.

Antietam, of course, was the bloody victory that Abraham Lincoln felt he needed in order to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. It was a major turning point in the politics of the war—and also in how Americans saw war. In the fall of 1862, in the month after Antietam, Mathew Brady mounted an exhibition at his gallery in New York titled “The Dead of Antietam.” A Northern world used to the propaganda offered by such images as Currier & Ives prints, used to thinking of the war as remote, as far away, suddenly took note. The New York Times review of these photographs on October 20, 1862 captured some of the shock felt by viewers—it is worth quoting in some detail:

Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it. At the door of his gallery hangs a little placard, “The Dead of Antietam.” Crowds of people are constantly going up the stairs; follow them, and you find them bending over photographic views of that fearful battle-field, taken immediately after the action. Of all objects of horror one would think the battle-field should stand preeminent, that it should bear away the palm of repulsiveness. But, on the contrary, there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures, and makes him loath to leave them. You will see hushed, reverend groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes. It seems somewhat singular that the same sun that looked down on the faces of the slain blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all semblance to humanity, and hastening corruption, should have thus caught their features upon canvas and given them perpetuity forever. But so it is.

Figure 7. "Collecting Remains of the Dead at Cold Harbor, Va., for interment after war." Library of Congress.

It was the photographic image that changed visual representations of war during the Civil War—that brought into focus the “real” war of death and carnage, in which some 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. But these images brought in their wake significant challenges for the American people, as Drew Gilpin Faust has written in her This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. How to make sense of the war;  how to give such terrible loss meaning, became one of the great cultural tasks of the war. We will be discussing some of those attempts to give visual meaning to the war over the course of this month.

In this post I have been dependent throughout on the extraordinary visual resources offered by the Library of Congress. I will be curious to hear how you have used images in your courses; what suggestions you have for teaching the Civil War as a visual event; and finally, would urge you to take a look as well at the rich resources available at the following Library of Congress website: http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/connections/civil-war-photographs/.

I look forward to our conversation this month.

In trying to think about how one can conclude a discussion of the Image of the West, I find myself standing at a kind of fork in the road. On the one side is a desire to keep on traveling deeper into the territory, and on the other is the need to point out all the roads we didn’t take. So, I’m going to venture down each fork in the road a little, and then circle back to build a sort of road sign for the other sojourners on the trail.

On Traveling Deeper into the Territory

Underneath each discussion we’ve had here concerning the images of the West has been the slipperiness of that little word, “of.” “Of” can mean “about,” but it can also mean “belonging to” and “from.” For the purposes of illustration, imagine the vastly different meanings of two ways of interpreting the phrase “images of the West”: one, as “images ABOUT the West,” and the other, as “images FROM the West.”

In the former, the “about” means that the images may document real tangible characteristics, or that they may be something made or even falsified. “About” can encompass virtually any point on a continuum between absolute truth and absolute lies. Images “about” can be produced by anyone, from anywhere, about anything that represents the West (and represents it to anyone). These images “about” the West can even be produced outside the West (for instance, when a Hoboken rooftop or a New Jersey wood can stand in for the West in Shreyvogel’s paintings or Porter’s The Great Train Robbery). One of the ways that traditionally presents itself to differentiate between “truer” and “less true” images ABOUT the West has been to judge whether people from the place claim them as their own – a sort of “let’s see which one got asked to dance” approach that is ultimately unsatisfying (not to mention contemporizing). That’s where the “of” is interpreted as “belonging to.” This “belonging” can be judged by the process of claiming an image as the West’s own (questions of authenticity), and it can also be traced through the factual correctness of the image (questions of accuracy). We’ve engaged in both of these practices here.

In the latter version of “images of the West,” the “of” means “images FROM the West.” In this iteration, the autobiographical quality of images of the West become their source for validation and valorization. The Western-ness of Mark Klett or Chuck Forsman, or the spatial belonging of Yolanda M. Lopez and Helen Hardin/Tsa-Sah-Wee-Eh, become a way of documenting the reality of the image that they convey of Western places and people. This is, in essence, what I was doing when I placed the three “cowboy” artists – Schreyvogel, Remington, and Russell – in a ranking by order of their degree of experience in the West. But something else, which we haven’t done that much of, is the documenting of the West as a site of production of images FROM the West. One could do this with a visual documentation of, for instance, Lois Rudnick’s argument that the Southwest was the birthplace of American Modernism. One could also look at the emergence of the conservation movement on Western lands (as reflected in the images produced by Westerners to argue for the conservation of Western wildlands) as a way to document this intellectual production FROM rather than simply ABOUT the West. Both of these stories carry with them the added value that they avoid the sort of creeping “regional essentialism” or even “regional separatism” that threatens this sort of approach, in which one’s identity as a Westerner trumps all other concerns. John Muir was born and raised in the industrializing Northeast; he woke to his sense of man’s place in rather than above nature as nearly everything tried to eat him in the Florida Everglades; he ultimately found his calling in the mountains of California. Is he a Westerner? In the sense that he lived and wrote and died for it, yes. But he wasn’t born there. I would argue that this should not disqualify him as being “of” the West. (I must admit some personal sensitivity on this point – as a fifth-generation Californian who received all of her degrees from a Western land-grant institution and spends every possible moment in the West, I still find myself regularly called upon to prove that my current location as a tenured scholar in New York City does not disqualify me as a Western scholar.)

If, then, we take the “images of the West” phrase to mean “images PRODUCED IN the West,” direction, from East to West. This parallels the larger argument for understanding the movement of ideas in American culture, not as something passed down from intellectual elites to the lower orders, or from whites to non-whites, as a process of uplift and civilization, but rather as a marketplace of interchange, in which ideas and conceptualizations are borrowed in all directions, with mechanisms like the media regulating the flow. Just as labor historians have documented the ways that the culture of workers has affected that of the privileged classes, focusing on the production of imagery in the West is a way to document the rich and less “top-down” history that in fact did exist in the region and nationally.

On The Roads We Didn’t Take

When thinking about the roads we didn’t take, I think I am mulling over topics for a Picturing United States History II – areas for further illumination, by scholars who have specialized in these specific issues which are tangled around images of the West. The ten-lane superhighway that we didn’t take and which looms largest in my mind is this: a serious consideration of images of Native peoples in the West. There are many lanes on this highway – that Native peoples have sometimes been represented as if they were the Western lands themselves (consonant with the placement of the Bureau of Indian Affairs under the Department of the Interior); sometimes as barriers to settlement; sometimes as reasons to go there (for instance, in Santa Fe Railway and Harvey House ads). Sometimes they are the rightful heirs, sometimes only placeholders waiting to turn it over to whites, sometimes absent or hidden. I would argue that this issue – images of Native peoples in the narrative of U.S. history – is a topic so rich and complex that it deserves treatment on its own, and as I could not hope to do it justice in this forum, I have only alluded to it obliquely – choosing instead to make a plea for seeing Indians as central to the twentieth century West. A second road not taken is the promise specifically of focusing on illustration, especially as it appeared in illustrated newspapers; in the comments in this forum, Josh Brown and John McClymer have provided examples of how powerfully that category of images could work in conveying perhaps more nakedly the intentions and values of those who produced, published, and consumed such images. A third road, and one which ideally transcends the regional history of the West, is the role of the federal government in producing and disseminating the images that have come to shape our view of specific regions, sites, and events, in national history. In the age of the visual internet, when the Library of Congress has become the source for a large number of the historical images which populate sites like Wikimedia’s Commons, this is an important issue. I’m certain there are many other roads branching off into the wilds; I invite the participants to suggest those that they see there.

And Back Again

For most of the twentieth century, Westerners have enjoyed marking roadside attractions with odd sculptures. Jackalopes in silhouette on a Wyoming hillside, Neon cowboys waving from Nevada casino signs, even California’s giant Randy’s Donuts or Tail o’ the Pup hot dog stand have served as signs – and not only of the sad reality that much of Western Americana – like antler furniture – is actually more kitsch than culture.

And so I’ll offer as my roadsign something that exists somewhere along the line where kitsch and culture meet – one of my favorite images made in the West. This is a Mickey Mouse Kachina, produced sometime after 1930, and held in the Smithsonian’s collections in Washington, DC (although not currently on view). The Smithsonian acquired it from the Delacourt Gallery in New York in the early 1950s; it had been owned previously by Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr., a collector of folk art.

(Unknown artist) Mickey Mouse Kachina, (sculpture). After 1930. Carved and painted cottonwood, feathers, and string. Smithsonian American Art Museum

Here’s what I like about the story of this image’s production in the West: although we don’t precisely know who made this, a fair assumption is that the person who made it was a Native person. The main reason for its collection, then, is the surprising juxtaposition of its form (traditional) and its content (modern). But it is held as part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, despite the fact that the Smithsonian has a branch, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), dedicated specifically to the cultural production of Native Americans. In that museum, works are attributed as carefully as possible to the person who made it, and if that kind of precision is not possible, then every effort is made to date the piece, to locate it geographically, and to, at the very least, be culturally specific about the piece’s origins. This kachina is not in the NMAI in part because it cannot be located in that way. It cannot even be definitively linked to a specific cultural group with any surety (although both curator Rayna Green and museum educator Elizabeth Shear Bredin have stated in print that it is a Hopi artifact). And yet, despite this less-than-pristine provenance, it is called, not a sculpture, but a “kachina.” A kachina is not simply a kind of sculpture – it’s a sculpture imbued with sacred significance to the person who made it and the specific group to which that person belongs. At the same time, the “shock of the new” that led to its inclusion in the collection of the Smithsonian assumes that Mickey Mouse and the maker of the kachina belong to separate worlds – yet, we also know that Mickey Mouse (the real Mickey Mouse created by Walt Disney) is a cultural product made in the West.

Seeing an image that has come to mean a kind of globalized homogeneity (consider the term “Disneyfication” here) captured in the (assumed to be) authentic cultural product of a Hopi Kachina suggests the complexity of intraregional Western cultural exchanges. In my own research into ethnographic narratives in the American Southwest, I was surprised myself when Mickey Mouse made several appearances in anthopologists’ field notebooks recording Tewa partum taboos. This was in part because I hadn’t expected to come across him in the midst of folklore, and in part because I had read the published versions of these stories which had edited out the Mickey Mouse references. But in the field notes, Tewa women told each other that, in addition to avoiding skinning rabbits during pregnancy lest the child be born with nicks on its skin, pregnant women should avoid watching Mickey Mouse movies lest their babies come out “jumping around and making no sense.” Rayna Green, in her discussion of the Mickey Mouse Kachina, argues that the use of Mickey Mouse as the face of a Mudhead clown in the carving of the kachina is an evocation of the Hopi tradition of Tusan Homichi, the mouse who saved the Hopi from starvation by fighting off the Hawk who was stealing their chickens; in this tradition, Tusan Homichi is a kind of Trickster who, through his clowning, teaches important lessons. Green argues, “When Disney Studios put its version of the Mouse spirit on the silver screen, it must have been wonderful for Hopis to see him sing, dance, and perform brave and Clownlike acts, just as in their old stories and in his then infrequent appearances in Hopiland…. In this instance [Hopi people] expropriated a symbol of power from the other culture, just as theirs had been expropriated for centuries by bahanas, the whites who’d come to Hopiland so long ago.

After Mickey Mouse began to appear in the thirties, how long or how often the Mickey Mouse kachina danced in the winter dances with the other masked spirits is not known. No one has seen him dance since the late fifties.” [Rayna Green, "The Mickey Mouse Kachina," American Art, Vol. 5, No. 1/2 (Winter-Spring 1991): 208-209, p. 208.]

What would this particular road sign mean? Probably something along the lines of, “Come on In; Many Languages Spoken Here.”

The third section of the forum will let us think about what the West means after the “closing of the Frontier” described by Turner. When we are talking about the nineteenth-century West, these process versus place questions can get a tad tangled up. But once we move beyond 1893, even devoted Turnerians must examine what the term “The West” means if the Frontier period is now closed.

For that reason, and because it argues that the contemporary West has a continuous history even into the twentieth century, it is worthwhile to think about the place of the West in the nation’s history from 1900 on. This begs the question – is the West still a distinct region in the twentieth century? Some of the characteristics of the modern West – the high concentration of federal land holding, the continued and visible presence of native peoples, the continued emphasis on extractive industries broadly defined to include farming, mining, and forestry – are consonant with the popular image of the West. Others – the concentration of Western populations in cities, the cosmopolitan make-up of the populace, the role that heavy industry and industrial strife have played in shaping the region – seem disconsonant. And yet the twentieth-century West, with both its consonant and disconsonant characteristics, remains distinctive within the nation.

The topic is vast, so let’s focus on three issues: the use of “Madonna” imagery to represent both actual and symbolic women; the transformation of the “Western landscape” image; and narratives of continuity.

W.H.D. Koerner, "The Madonna of the Prairie" 1921

Yolanda M. Lopez, "Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe" (2002)

Helen Hardin (Little Standing Spruce/Tsa-Sah-Wee-Eh; Santa Clara Pueblo), "Changing Woman" (1982)

The four images provided – well-known Western illustrator W.H.D. Koerner’s 1921 “Madonna of the Prairie,” Dorothea Lange iconic 1936 FSA photograph known as “Migrant Mother,” Chicana artist Yolanda M. Lopez’s 2002 self-portrait as The Virgin of Guadalupe, and the Santa Clara Pueblo painter Helen Hardin’s 1982 “Changing Woman” – all present evocations of actual women while presenting women as symbols of community and continuity. Presenting an overlander haloed by the arch of her wagon, Koerner argues for the inclusion of female experience even while he presents the “prairie madonna” as a symbol of the coming of “civilization” to the West. Although it was painted in the twentieth century, Koerner’s image draws on the nineteenth-century Frontier mythos, providing a comforting narrative of the seamless integration of the West into an expanding nation. The other three works, while they also invoke Madonna imagery, present a more complicated narrative of both women’s experiences and the region – in part, perhaps, because they are all images produced by women.

Much has been written about Dorothea Lange’s photograph taken for the Farm Security Administration in 1936; it is one of the most well-known American photographs. It is often presented as a part of a national, rather than regional, narrative; but re-imagining it as part of a quintessentially Western story illuminates many of the continuities of nineteenth-century histories in the twentieth century. In this re-imagining, Dust Bowl emigrants parallel the movements of overland pioneers seeking a promised land of prosperity. Like those who came before them, they arrive in a place already populated and decidedly not “free for the taking.” Like nineteenth-century emigrants, they depend on the support of the federal government and on the institutions of an established economy to make their way in their new home. Further, Bill Ganzel’s photograph, taken in 1979, of Florence Thompson with her daughters in California, shows the true theme of Lange’s photograph: survival.

Bill Ganzel, Florence Thompson and Her Daughters, California, 1979

Some of those encountered by these twentieth-century overlanders were the descendants of peoples who had called the region home long before the nineteenth century. Native peoples who had lived in continuous settlements in the Southwest since the eleventh century had their own ways of staking a claim to their homes. Helen Hardin, also known by her Tewa name of Little Standing Spruce or Tsa-Sah-Wee-Eh, was born in Santa Clara Pueblo in 1943, the daughter of well-known Pueblo artist Pablita Velarde and an Anglo father. As a child of mixed heritage, Hardin herself reflected the difficult coalitions and alliances that emerged in the region between Native peoples and new arrivals. Her paintings present her view of contemporary Pueblo life as simultaneously anchored to tradition and looking toward modernity (they are shaped by both traditional images, such as Mimbres symbols and Tewa figures of spiritual belief, and modern Abstract styles of painting). Her paintings have received mixed receptions; during her lifetime she won awards from tribally-affiliated organizations and museums, but was also criticized by Tewa elders for revealing esoteric information in her artwork. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in her late thirties, Hardin began a series of paintings of “Changing Woman,” an evocation of Tewa traditions of women as creator-figures but also of her own ability to survive and adapt. Although she died at the age of forty-one, Hardin’s images survive as a testimony to the reality of Native American presence and survival.

Alongside Native peoples, the descendants of Spanish settlers could also trace their presence in the region to a much earlier time. Although they were often represented as “Mexicans” in the twentieth-century West, many Latinos in the West were not immigrants; instead, they had been on the land long before the American border with Mexico moved south after the ending of the Mexican-American War in 1848. These tejanos, nuevo mejicanos, and californios had prior claim to much of the Southwest. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which settled the border at the Rio Grande made pledges to respect the culture, language, and rights of Mexican citizens who now found themselves under the government of the expanded United States. Despite this, from 1848 into the twentieth century, the rights and prior claims of Latinos in the region were regularly violated. Active resistance to these usurpations took the form of labor struggles (such as the organization of farm workers under the UFW) but also the creation of a “Chicano/a” identity that traced its roots to “La Raza Cosmica” (The Cosmic Race), the New World blending of the blood and cultures of America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. One of the chief symbols of this identity is The Virgin of Guadalupe, the 1531 vision of Mary on Tepeyac, a hill associated with an Aztec goddess, by an Indian in the Spanish colony of New Spain. Yolanda M. Lopez has used the image to great effect as a way to represent the lives of Chicanas in the West – as in her 2002 self-portrait in running shoes, but also as a series of portraits of Chicana women as seamstresses, craftswomen, farmworkers, and the like.

Yolanda M. Lopez, "Victoria F. Franco: Our Lady of Guadalupe" 2002

Yolanda M. Lopez, "Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe" 2002

Yolanda M. Lopez, "Madre Mestiza" 2002

Other Chicana artists have also drawn on the Guadalupe image; see, for instance, Alma Lopez’s 1999 “Our Lady,” which when exhibited at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe in 2001 resulted in controversy similar to the response to Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph “Piss Christ.” (Alma Lopez’s site about the controversy contains images of “Our Lady”; a collection of essays about the controversy will be published in 2010 by the University of Texas Press).

Thomas Moran, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872, oil on canvas. Smithsonian American Art Museum

Thomas Moran, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872 (detail), oil on canvas. Smithsonian American Art Museum

Mark Klett, Contemplating the view at Muley Point, Utah, 1994

Chuck Forsman, Point of View, 2007

Let us start with Thomas Moran’s “Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” as the representative of Western landscapes as presented in the nineteenth century. Moran’s most famous image of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone is not the one that I have included here. The more famous version, the one that appeared at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and currently resides in the Smithsonian in Washington DC does not have figures in it. His less-well known version of the painting, the one included here, does. Yet, even though people are present in this version, they are so tiny as not to be noticeable unless one is aware of their presence. One of the striking things about more contemporary representations of Western landscapes is the drive to include the human figure – and not just for scale, as Moran did, but because the Western landscape is also a human landscape. Chuck Forsman, an Idaho-born artist whose style approaches photorealism, paints gorgeous landscapes of Western scenes, but they include people and the marks of people upon the land, an accounting of what Forsman has termed his “lover’s quarrel” with how Westerners have used the land.

Chuck Forsman, Crow Country, 1993

Chuck Forsman, Ants, 1996

Chuck Forsman, Snake Meridian, 1997

His 2007 painting “Point of View” calls to mind a tourist’s snapshot – but significantly, the people depicted in the painting are presented as connected to this place. Their feed caps and working shirts, and their easy intimacy with the cliff mark them as belonging, not as tourists. Mark Klett, a photographer based in Arizona, has made a career of depicting Western landscapes as human landscapes and as part of an historical development. Klett’s photographs are memorable and recognizable for his inclusion of his own body in the landscape space.

Mark Klett, Self-portrait with Saguaro, About My Same Age, Pinacate, Sonora, 10/29/99

His photograph “Contemplating the view at Muley Point, Utah, 1994,” shows him dangling his feet over the edge of a cliff, imposing his presence upon an otherwise uninterrupted vista. With this act, he erases the idea of the Western landscape as empty and forefronts the image-maker as present in the scene.

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, 2007. View from the south rim of the Grand Canyon with Thomas Moran and California Condor number 302 (one of one hundred fifty-five in the wild). Right: Thomas Moran, America’s greatest scenic artist sketching at Bright Angel Cove, Arizona. (Half of stereo view) Keystone-Mast Collection, California Museum of Photography, Riverside.

In part, Klett’s images reflect his involvement in a larger project of re-evaluating the nineteenth century image of the West. Sometimes referred to as the “rephotography” project, this work reflects the collaboration (sometimes formal, sometimes not) of photographers who have revisited sites of famous landscapes (or events and individuals, as in Bill Ganzel’s return to Florence Thompson, above). Klett’s current work encompasses a collaboration with the photographer Byron Wolfe in which contemporary images are combined with historical ones, as in “View from the south rim of the Grand Canyon with Thomas Moran and California Condor number 302 (one of one hundred fifty-five in the wild),” 2007.

Timothy O'Sullivan, 1869. Untitled (U.S. Geological Survey)

Rick Dingus for the Rephotographic Survey Project, 1978. Edge of Storm Mountain Reservoir, Big Cottonwood Canyon, UT

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe for Third View, 1999. Edge of Storm Mountain Reservoir, Big Cottonwood Canyon, UT

This project builds in a more creative way on the more documentary earlier rephotographies that include several stages of revisiting the site. As in the series of images of Storm Mountain Reservoir, Big Cottonwood Canyon, UT, original photographs by surveyors like Timothy O’Sullivan were revisited in the 1970s by participants in the Rephotographic Survey Project, which engaged 120 sites of 1870s government survey photographs. Subsequently, a “third view” of these sites was undertaken in the 1990s. In looking at the images by Timothy O’Sullivan (1869), Rick Dingus (1978), and Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe (1999), the “timelessness” of the Western landscape is debunked; what has marked the change over time is the imposition of government power on the land, in the form of a reservoir in 1978, and a fence in 1999. In that final image, especially, lie a number of evocative Western images: the rustling cheat grass; the barbed wire on the fence, so high that it is clearly not there to keep cattle in or out; and, in the back of the mind, Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In.”

I must admit here that I fall firmly into the “West as place” school, myself; by this I mean that when I say “the West,” I mean a place with longitude and latitude that can be located unmoving on a map. Still, as a cultural historian, I can hardly ignore the compelling influence that Turner’s conceptualization of the West has played on the West from outside but also internal self-definitions used by Westerners. Thus, I would argue that there is some usefulness in understanding the idea of a moving frontier—but only when “frontier” is defined as a zone of interactions between Eastern-linked Euroamericans on one side and “others” on the other side. The West is an actual place, with actual definitions on a map, and actual characteristics (both historical and geographical); the frontier is an idea applied to a place, and while the “zone” may shift, like the front line in a battle, the West itself doesn’t move around. But how to convey that the Frontier and the West are not interchangeable terms for the place? It is a challenge, because the terms are used so imprecisely (”Frontier” is used when “West” is meant, and “West” is used when “Frontier” is meant, etc.).

Clearly, the discussion has to start with a definition and a delineation of which is which. But, by terming “The Frontier” an idea and the “West” as a place, I do not mean to say that one is *only*imagined while the other is real. Ideas are real, too; the Frontier was, at different times, an actual line on the map (delineated in government acts, borders, etc.). As a concept in the mind of those who looked west, it was a very real thing (the point at which familiarity grew scarce) with real consequences. It also seems to have meant something real from the other side of the zone—signifying the point at which trade could be established, or the point at which one lost contact with ones own population. So, the “imagined” versus “actual” argument here is not the central one. Instead, the struggle is to understand how the idea and the place interacted, and to trace the shorter history of the idea against the never-ending history of the place.

This “shorter history” of the idea of the Frontier asks us to look at visual representations from the period in which that idea held sway—since the arrival of Europeans in what we now call the United States. This would mean that we need to examine not only an English concept of a frontier but also the Spanish, the French, and the Russian concepts of the zone of interaction. For our purposes, however, it would be sufficient to focus on the high points of Frontier ideology in the national context, which would be the moments at which Westward expansion became a national focus. This focus is clearest in the context of “Manifest Destiny” broadly defined, to include not only the 1846-1848 War against Mexico but also the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. The visual history of this concept is rich and includes most of the iconic nineteenth-century images of the West. Several (Emanuel Leutze’s 1861 painting Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (Westward Ho!), Andrew Melrose’s 1867 painting Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way-near Council Bluffs, Iowa, Albert Bierstadt’s 1867 painting Emigrants Crossing the Plains, and John Gast’s 1872 American Progress) have been included in previous forum postings or the essay. Many of these images were reproduced via lithograph to form a part of the recruitment propaganda for expansion. Additional notable examples include William Ranney’s Daniel Boone’s First View of Kentucky (1849), George Caleb Bingham’s Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap (1851), and William S. Jewett’s The Promised Land — The Grayson Family (1850). All carry strong messages about an empty land awaiting conquest often with overtly religious overtones (appropriate to the religious Manifest Destiny ideal). Bingham’s Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap is filled with religious imagery as well as the presence of a civilizing” woman, a scene which Patricia Hills has likened to “the Lord who with a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night, led the Israelites into the Land of Canaan.” Ranney’s Daniel Boone’s First View of Kentucky, Hills argues, promises Mexican-American War-wearied viewers that the westward expansion will be peacefully achieved. In these “Manifest Destiny” images, allegorical figures, as well as historical ones, stand in for the American polity, inscribing both a historical narrative and a predictive story onto the idea of the Frontier.

William Ranney, Daniel Boone's First View of Kentucky, 1849

George Caleb Bingham, Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap, 1851

William S. Jewett, The Promised Land -- The Grayson Family, 1850

The longer history of the West can be represented with maps outlining the unchanging features of the landscape, as well as images of the place itself. A richer approach is to then examine the supposedly “value-free” images collected to document the place through the same lens applied to the more overtly opinionated “Frontier” images. For instance, a large body of survey materials—paintings, photographs, maps, and the like—survive, commissioned for the most part by the federal government. Thomas Moran, who accompanied the Geological Survey of the Territories to the Yellowstone River basin, produced numerous images of the grandeur of the landscape, mixing his pigments from local clays so as to accurately record the colors of the place (several examples of his work appear in the essay). Timothy O’Sullivan, who accompanied the U.S. Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel, produced hundreds of photographs that recorded not only landscapes but also native peoples in the Southwest (see, for instance, O’Sullivan’s photographs South side of Inscription Rock, N.M., Navajo weavers, Near old Fort Defiance, New Mexico, White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, and Old Mission Church, Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, all taken 1873).

Timothy O'Sullivan, South side of Inscription Rock, N.M., 1873

Navajo weavers, near old Fort Defiance, New Mexico, 1873

Timothy O'Sullivan, White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, 1873

Timothy O'Sullivan, Old Mission Church, Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, 1873

Andrew J. Russell, Driving the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869

Comparing these “survey” images to later (twentieth-century) attempts to recreate the processes used to record the “visual data” provides a fascinating account of how much influence over the image the artist, in fact, had (we will talk more about this in the third section of the forum, which compares the nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual Wests). I have mentioned the fact that maps, even while accurate, were rarely value-neutral (see, for instance: Peter Fidler, after Ac ko mok ki, An Indian Map of the Different Tribes, that Inhabit the East and West Side of the Rocky Mountains . . . (1801); Panoramic map of Spokane Falls, Washington, 1890; and Rio Colorado of the West . . . (1858) in the essay). But neither were “scientific” images. Moran’s images of the Yellowstone echo the emptiness of the Manifest Destiny images; O’Sullivan’s sometimes played with perspective to enhance the dramatic effect of natural features.

Thus, I would conclude with an open-ended question for the forum: How do you help students to understand the difference between the West as a place and the Frontier as a process visually? What are the challenges inherent in the process of separating the two ideas even while examining their interactions? The difficulty that I find myself confronting is the challenge of presenting the argument in a sufficiently subtle way that does not end up just seeming like the splitting of hairs. The danger of reading the “process” and the “place” images side by side for interactions is that doing so can be confusing—in recognizing continuities, differences get eroded.

By way of throwing out an image and letting the forum participants play with it (something I like to do with my classes), let’s see what we can make with this one: the iconic photograph by Andrew J. Russell titled Driving the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869. Is it an image of the process or the place? Or is it both? What needs to be understood to read the image, to go back to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “thickly”?

In this month’s “Picturing the West” forum, I want to examine three broad areas:

1) The Real West and The Imagined West
Much has been said about the differences between the Real and the Imagined West; for our purposes here, we will use the following distinctions: by the “Real West” we will mean images that provide documentary evidence of the Western past which can be corroborated with other sources, which are specifically located in a place and time, and which contain people behaving in ways that align with what would have been the everyday and typical behaviors common to the place and time; by the “Imagined West” we will mean images that illustrate the ways in which viewers have been encouraged at different times to have a specific perspective on the region, with images constructed (sometimes—but not always—outside the West and by people who have had little first-hand experience of the West) to convey embedded values about what the West “means.” The purpose of this discussion will be not simply to “debunk” certain images and to valorize others, but to identify significant differences among them and to understand the value of this distinction in teaching about the history of the West and the nation. Further, it is important that at times the same images can depict both “real” and “imagined” Wests.

Charles Schreyvogel, "Defending the Fort."

Schreyvogel painting on roof of his apartment building, Hoboken, N.J., 1903.

Frederic Remington, "Fight for the Water Hole" (1903).

Charles M. Russell, "Thoroughman's Home on the Range" (1897).

2) The Frontier as a Process and the West as a Place
The debate over the so-called “New Western History” centered on the difference between using the West as a stand-in for the “Frontier process” explained by Frederick Jackson Turner—which means that the West is situated in an ever-changing location (moving westward to the Pacific) depending on local socioeconomic conditions—on the one hand, and discussing the West as a place (located since the beginning of time to the West of the Mississippi River with a history that stretches back even beyond the earliest points of human memory). I would like to examine the differences in such visual representations of the processes of the “expansion of (or closing of) the frontier” and the desire to record continuity, a deep history, and the long stretch of time in a specific (even geological) place.

Andrew Melrose, "Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way—near Council Bluffs, Iowa" (1867).

Thomas Moran, "Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone II."

Andrew J. Russell, "Driving the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869."

3) The Nineteenth- & The Twentieth-Century Wests
When the West stops “looking Western” (when images of the place no longer show us cowboys on horseback lined up in front of a saloon, say), what does it mean to refer to “images of the West”? In this section, I would like to examine the challenges and rewards of examining the images of both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Wests, to begin to trace out distinct “western” aspects in the images which point towards simultaneously subtler and richer evocations of the history of the West and the ways in which the region fits into the larger national narrative of U.S. history.

Thomas Moran, "Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone" (1872).

Chuck Forsman, "Point of View" (2007)—This is a painting.

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe with inset by 1872 William Bell, "Headlands North of the Colorado River Plateau and Chocolate Butte near Mouth of the Paris, Arizona (2009).

Poster for "Dead Man," dir. Jim Jarmusch (1995).

To start, I’d like to ask a big question, with a number of related sub-questions, of the participants.

When you think of a single image (or two or three) which “encapsulate” the visual image of “The West,” what is that image? I’ve provided a range here, both above and below, to get things going. You might imagine here that you are charged with choosing the image that will serve as the cover of a book called something like The Complete History of the West and Its Role in the Nation.

Does this image focus on a location or an event? Does it emphasize a specific moment and place, or is it “timeless” and generally-located? Are there people in it, and if so, who are they? Is the image dominated by natural or by human-made objects? In what ways must this image be “Western”— meaning it could not be a “Southern” or “New England” image? When was the image produced, by whom, and for what purpose? How did you learn about the image? What does your choice of image say about the narrative that you believe is central to telling the story of the West? What does your choice of image say about the role you believe the West has played in the larger, national historical narrative?

Emanuel Leutze, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (Westward Ho!)" (1861).

John Gast, "American Progress" (1872).

Albert Bierstadt, "Emigrants Crossing the Plains" (1867).

John Wayne in "Stagecoach," dir. John Ford (1939).

Look closely—what do you notice?

John Vachon, "Workers leaving Pennsylvania shipyards, Beaumont, Texas," June 1943, Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress

It took me a few looks at first, but I finally noticed that the African-American men are all walking in a single, separate line from the other workers; closer inspection suggests that there is in fact a railing enforcing that single-file lane. This photographic evidence of Jim Crow on the job becomes even more striking when you learn that the photo was taken two weeks before a fifteen-hour riot in which white residents of Beaumont terrorized people and property in the city’s black neighborhoods. It was not the first incident of white on black violence in the city, where sudden wartime crowding brought black and white residents into contact in new ways.

Alexander Liberman, photographer, "United We Win," poster (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office for the War Manpower Commission, 1943)

A different branch of the U.S. government, the War Manpower Commission, produced this propaganda poster in 1943, the same year as the Beaumont photo and riot (and of numerous other incidents of racially-motivated violence in forty-six cities and towns around the country). The federal government understood that white racism had the strong potential to undercut black morale during wartime. When the OWI commissioned a public opinion study on “White Attitudes Toward the Negro” in 1942, it concluded “the task of making Americans generally see the importance of bringing the nation’s Negro minority more fully into the war effort is one of immense difficulty. . . . large numbers of people in all regions showed what must be regarded as an illiberal attitude toward Negroes.” Taken together, these pictures offer new insights and connections: about World War II, Jim Crow, the role of the federal government in social change, and the terrain on which struggles for racial equality played out in the twentieth century.

The historical visual record of the United States is marred by gaps and distortions, especially in representing race and equality. But if we view past images as simply uniform and unchanging, we will fail to catch significant examples that defied the “visual order.” And some of those exceptions appeared in commercial publications, not as you might expect from alternative or minority periodicals, in part because the readership of those newspapers and magazines included African Americans and their allies.

1876 marked America’s one-hundredth birthday, and the center of the celebration was the lavish Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Boasting 450 acres of technological wonders, national resources, and achievements in art and culture, the lavish fair was more about the future than the past, heralding the nation’s triumphant recovery and dynamic growth since its bloody civil war. Although it opened in the third year of the worst economic depression in U.S. history up to that time (a shantytown outside the fair grounds threatened to dampen the celebration until city officials tore it down), the Exposition drew ten million visitors and every pictorial publication in the country covered its attractions for months. But there was little either on the fair grounds or in print that acknowledged, let alone celebrated, the very recent extraordinary experience of emancipation and Reconstruction

Indeed, African Americans as players in the fair’s activities were noted more by their absence. The Women’s Pavilion excluded black women even though they had helped raise money to construct the exhibit. No black workers were hired to construct the fair and those who were employed on the grounds during its six-month run only did menial tasks (including work in the Southern Restaurant where, one guidebook explained, “a band of old-time plantation ‘darkies’ . . . sing their quaint melodies and strum the banjo”).

Sol Eytinge, “The Centennial—Visit of the ‘Small Breed’ family,” Harper's Weekly, November 4, 1876

Undaunted, many African Americans visited the Centennial Exposition, determined to participate in the national celebration. Their efforts became grist for the mill of popular artists such as Harper’s Weekly’s Sol Eytinge, Jr., whose “Blackville” series of comic illustrations offered to readers across the country a continuous supply of buffoonish portrayals of freedpeople.

One extraordinary exception to the racial divide that the Centennial marked both socially and symbolically was the statue of The Freed Slave, which stood in the exposition’s massive Memorial Hall. Significantly, this bold, life-size figure holding the Emancipation Proclamation aloft and breaking his own chains was sculpted by an Austro-Italian artist, Francesco Pezzicar, and mounted as part of Austria’s contribution to the fair. It also was the focus of unusual derision by American commentators. Atlantic editor William Dean Howells, for example, called it “a most offensively Frenchy negro, who has broken his chain, and spreading both his arms and legs abroad is rioting in a declamation of something from Victor Hugo; one longs to clap him back into hopeless bondage.”

Fernando Miranda, “Philadelphia, Pa.—The Centennial Exposition—The statue of ‘The Freed Slave’ in Memorial Hall,” Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, August 5, 1876

But as this engraving published in an August issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper attested, the statue was a magnet for African-American visitors of all classes, a powerful visual symbol from abroad that commemorated their hard fought achievements and, even in the face of violence and faltering federal commitment, persistent aspirations. The statue (which returned to Trieste, where it is now housed in the Civico Museo Revoltella, Galleria d’arte moderna) was to have no counterpart in the United States until the unveiling of the Boston memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment in 1897 .

The Frank Leslie’s engraving, based on a sketch by “special artist” Fernando Miranda, offers a unique perspective on the Centennial and African-American participation. It could be argued that this scene of African Americans gathered around the “striking and impressive” statue of The Freed Slave in the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition merely domesticated the black experience, safely relegating slavery to a grim past, situating freedom as fulfilled as opposed to its reality as deferred. But if we take into account the abuse that was showered on the Memorial Hall statue and the overall exclusion of African Americans from the Centennial’s celebrations—as well as the range of black types portrayed—the engraving stands as a powerful statement of dignity and equality.