I plan to speak about my work on
Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War, focusing on the nature of my collaboration with a professional illustrator named Jonathan Fetter-Vorm. I will discuss two challenges I faced, emphasizing how the experience forced me to rethink my work as a historian. First, being part of a team that produced a graphic history required me to reconceptualize the rendering of historical narratives more broadly. The medium of graphic history is necessarily visual. I learned, consequently, that in order to realize its full potential, the text, the scripting in this case, had to be subsidiary to the images. For a historian steeped in text-based storytelling, this presented an opportunity to reimagine how I typically convey elements of the past to my audiences. I gained insights – particularly about the use of visual metaphor, narrative strategies, and setting scenes – that I have subsequently exported into my other work.
And second, working in a graphic medium pushed me to the limits of my epistemological and methodological comfort zones. I learned that graphic histories are typically shelved in bookstores and libraries among graphic novels, which raised thorny questions about the definition of historical scholarship. At the same time, the act of representing the past through original images – I was responsible, in the course of scripting the book, for determining the images Fetter-Vorm would draw – forced me to consider the line between fact and fiction, the ways in which even traditional, text-based histories are a kind of artifice, built through triage, choices about what stays and what goes, what should and should not be revealed to readers, and how much of the architecture of production should be laid bare and how much should be hidden.
