Photographic Histories of the Civil War and the First World War and Rebirth

Abstract

The article compares The Photographic History of the Civil War published in 1912, with A Photographic History of the First World War, published in 1933. The author is looking for similarities in the reworking of interpretations of war photography after the war and discovers that the photographs in conjunction with their editing can be made to cover up as much as they reveal. The Photographic History of the Civil War, published at the height of the Jim Crow era, with its hugely elaborate editorial structure, manages to deny the importance of slavery to the war and the importance of freed slaves afterwards. Even photographs of the dead of Gettysburg take on a meaning more appropriate to 1912 than to the event that produced them. The comparatively direct A Photographic History of the First World War, manages loyalty only to the thought of the author at the moment of its publication. Other interpretations were possible at other times as the author editor followed literary fashion and history.