Forum: history and the Web: From the illustrated newspaper to cyberspace: visual technologies and interaction in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries1

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Abstract

This article is a self-critical, historically informed progress report to assess ways that different forms of visual media admit and frustrate public expression and education. Reviewing more than a decade of digital projects produced by the American Social History Project and its collaborators, I consider ways that the design of visual digital projects may provide opportunities for active learning on the part of users and a renewed dialogue between new media producers and consumers. Some of the clues to creative interactivity in the new visual media of the present may be found by referring back 150 years to the visual technologies of the past.

Keywords:

• Digital history
• Immersive
• Narrative
• Database

Notes

Routledge cannot be held responsible for the content or accuracy of the urls linked from the online version of this article; which can be found at

• http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13642529.asp

• http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/

; History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web :

• http://historymatters.gmu.edu

.

These observations were prompted by Roy Rosenzweig’s better memory and astute comments on the original draft of this article.

Since Neil Harris’ seminal study Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (1973), a new generation of scholarship has explored the many facets of Barnum and his American Museum’s influence on US culture, including Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture (1997); Buckley, ‘To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820–1860’ (1984); Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (2000); and Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (2001).

Moreover, as Stafford notes, the covert blending of new media—as opposed to its overt mixing—suggests it has been ‘devised by an unseen someone or something’ (the hidden hand of the designer I noted above), which only ‘reinforces the more generalized suspicion that images are inherently tricking or duplicitous by nature’ (p. 77).

For a comparison between the communication revolutions of the nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, see Standage 1999; see also Schivelbusch 1979, and Harvey 1988.

This section summarizes some of my argument in Beyond the Lines (Brown 2002).

‘The tramp nuisance’, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 5 August 1876, pp. 354–355; ‘An evening scene in Madison Park.—The “tramps” free lodging-place’, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 21 July 1877, p. 341; Fernando Miranda (del.), ‘New York City.—Early morning at a police station—Turning out the vagrant night lodgers’, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 10 February 1877, p. 377 (engraving), p. 379 (description).