"Ten Times Better Than a Letter": Integrating the Visual into Collegiate Teaching and Analysis

This paper will discuss the influence of visual studies on historical pedagogy at the collegiate level. Employing critical analysis and discussion of several iconic visual examples from a range of eras in American history, including the Paul Revere engraving of the Boston Massacre and the (self-) portraiture of Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, the presentation will provide starting points for educators who seek to critically engage the images that have been all-too-commonly treated as self-contained and self-explanatory in the classroom or as textbook and monograph illustrations. The author will also include her own research on gold rush portraiture and nineteenth-century spectatorial entertainment forms, both as examples of how images functioned synchronically and how they continue to operate diachronically; that is, the roles and significance of images in their original contexts and as demonstrations of how they can continue to inform our historical comprehension and research today. The paper will also make note of the ways that visual graphing, charting, and mapping can provide innovative new tools for conveying sophisticated—if also oftentimes dense or complicated—statistics, movements, and other historical data to college students.