Explores the relations between photo-journalism and history, investigating how photographs shape both, what we remember and how we remember. This book provides insight into how photographs, generate a sense of national community, and reinforce prevailing social, cultural, and political values.

This symbiotic relationship and the mass-market acceptance of this dramatic and often melodramatic pictorial genre had an enormous effect on the kind and the intensity of history that Americans absorbed.".

Traces the simultaneous crafting of political power, the codification of a historical record, and the unfolding of cultural change

Publisher Description

This monograph is a wide-ranging and sophisticated analysis of representations in text and image of the English past between 1830 and 1870. It consists of a series of inter-related case-studies of illustrated history books, ranging from editions of David Humes History of England to W. H. Ainsworths The Tower of London (1840). It contributes to present debates on nationalism, highlighting the complex and variable nature of cultural constructions of identity. Simultaneously, if offers an overall interpretation of historiographical change in early and mid-Victorian Britain, focusing in particular on the transition from picturesque reconstructions of the English past to the scientific approaches of the professional historian. Genuinely interdisciplinary, Picturing the Past presents new perspectives on traditional studies of Victorian historiography, literature, and illustration. It explores relationships between text and image, author, illustrator, and publisher, in the production of illustrated historical texts, often drawing on neglected material in publishers archives. The tendency to analyse text and image, fiction and non-fiction, popular and elite publications in isolation from each other is challenged in the interests of a more complex and nuanced portrait of the middle-class Victorian historical consciousness.

Archaeological discoveries have shed light on the lives and beliefs of ordinary ancient Egyptians. Using photographs, illustrations, archaeology information boxes, and "How Do We Know?" boxes--which provide evidence for the information given--"Ancient Egypt" re-creates daily life in remarkable and well-founded detail.

This survey of British historical films of the 1930s and 1940s offers an account of the attitudes of official bodies, film-makers and audiences to the costume film. Archive records unearthed by Sue Harper reveal the extent to which government agencies and institutions attempted to influence the cinematic representation of history. This book goes on to contrast the work of a range of key producers and charts the vagaries of audience response.