12 30 p. M. Welcome. I have the happy task of introducing your president and my friend marnie sandweiss. We will present this room and tell the story of marnie and me and her work, which got us all here. Let me start with the magical alchemy of graduate school. All of us leadheaded thinkers turned into scholars and teachers. The process works Something Like this. Imagine a group of students as a cohort. The cohort becomes classmates. The classmates become colleagues. And once in a while they become lifelong friends. So, colleagues, cohort, classmate, colleague, and that golden thing, a friend. I am cheating a little bit because she came to yale to study with Harold Lamarr a year after me and she was in the History Department and i was in that ragtag group in american studies. [applause] not a cohort exactly. We did become friends, puzzling throughdings, yawning brilliant, but sometimes excruciating seminars. Western history, some of you may know, was taught in the basement. And on friday afternoons. The slow drone of graduate students, our own included, we nevada, orout th timothy osullivan. We survived our basement years, scattered, and became colleagues, solving problems for our students, for each other , and for the professional organizations that support our work. So, cohort, classmate, collie, colleague, but for me, we became friends, most important. A last bit of graduate school alchemy that knit the strange world of ideas where we do our work into the world of spouses, partners, families, and children where we live our lives. This long friendship made me lucky enough to read drafts of her books along the way, yellowing pages still turn up in my files. I read them and i read them again last week. Why are you reading my books, she said. I learn stuff, i said. I will tell you briefly some of the things i have learned. Was a biography gilpinphotographer laura. On many awards, and i do not have time to tell you all of them. But theres a story. She abandoned her colleagues and moved to fort worth to become the curator of photography. Legend has it that she will tell you this legend has it her hiring was an accident. The interviewer confused or with her with another graduate student. True or not, the museum had a lucky break and she had a job offer, but with a hitch. She needed to defend a dissertation proposal, so she seems to have dreamed up an idea. How about the french in the mississippi valley. She wrote it up in a couple of weeks, defended it, and moved to texas. In fort worth, she published on texas photography and the mexican war. She curated different exhibitions. When laura gilpin left her estate to the museum, she had an archive, a subject, and a chance to work out her conviction that photography was more than a means to illustrate ideas presented in a text. Photography is an interpretive act, she said. A primary source as crucial to history as a descriptive diary or legal document. She wrote a book about gilpin, but she wanted her phd. Now, i have a story that i have told that she tells me is a legend, and it is wrong. That she finished this beautiful book about the photographer, came back to new haven and said here is my dissertation and in a brilliant stroke of reverse engineering, wrote a proposal, defended it, and turn in the dissertation. She tells me that isnt true. Actually began the book, wrote a proposal, but i still say this. Its probably the fastest dissertation ever to come out of the yale History Department. She left to direct the art museum at amherst college, but continued to write about photography and the visual history of the American West. Editing and contributing to half a dozen books, including the awardwinning history of the American West. They are here. She has always been a scholar at heart, not a museum administrator. O she left she finally joined the History Department at princeton. Through all those museum years, she was working on the big book on photography and the American West. Print the legend came out in 2002. It swept up a batch of prizes and impressed readers with his contention that the conquest and development of the American West could not be understood without reckoning with the Simultaneous Development of the history of photography. Claimuck to this bold through the archives and big stories of the American West. No surprise, research on photography led her to work on the expeditions that mapped the western landscapes and the career of clarence king. Her accounts of kings life passing strange a gilded age tale of love and deception returnse color line to the biographical arts she learned about inviting about gilpin and the archival patients she had mastered. What animates passing strange though is race, the color line that snakes its way through the postemancipation United States. Her own work in a way a survey of that color line. It shakes her extraordinary project, the webbased collaborative that she led him on princeton and slavery. Videos, stories unearthed have left us with a campus changed by the materials they have found to record and represent the many roles of enslaved people in the history of that university. So let me end this intellectual wedding toast by turning to las vegass other industry, until you one other story about your president as a gambler. [laughter] you wonder about this. It did happen. I went to see her in santa fe. Just as she had to fort worth. It worked again in santa fe. Come see me, she insisted, sure that the beauties of the wintryst were wet my soul needed at the time. And we took ourselves on a gambling adventure to the camel rock casino. Back in those pretechnological days, we each invested 20 in quarters and armed with our grubby plastic cups spent the evening playing the slots. We amused ourselves for a few hours, our dutiful souls taming the wild world of gambling and turning it into an evening outing. As she took no risks at the casino floor, not so with her work, which digs into the archive, opens eyes. I tell you, her work and you will learn stuff. So let me give the podium to my imagined cohort, sleepy classmate, my generous colleague , and my brilliant friend and let you listen to the next iteration of our marvelous weave of the visual, the verbal, the stories that play across history scales, from intimate encounters to imperial schemes. So raise a toast of whatever is on your table to her talk history, thinking about, and with photographs. [applause] prof. Sandweiss thank you, ann. When i first came to this meeting 40 years ago, i never imagined standing up your. In fact probably did not imagine still standing. But intellectual curiosity in the sense of professional obligation brought me here in the first place, but its the friendships that have brought me back. I want to say at the outset, thanks to all of you. Thank you all for making this such a congenial and welcoming home for me. It has been an honor to serve as your president. [applause] now, the french historian once said there are two kinds of andorians, parachutists truffle hunters. He did not elaborate, but we can infer what he meant. The parachutist can see large patterns and track the movement of events, people, pathogens, ideas across vast stretches of space and time. You need to be a parachutist to see how old world germs or animals reshaped the new world, but you can miss things from up there. From up high, its hard to see the rhythms of daily life. From the Space Shuttle might spy the smoke plume from of all iceland, but you would be hardpressed to understand the trouble of those in an airport in rome. Conversely, those very local circumstances are what interest truffle hunters. A truffle hunter may not see how atmospheric currents disperse the volcanic ash above the peninsula, but she might learn something really interesting by eavesdropping on a conversation in the airport bar. So let me confess, i am afraid of heights. By temperament i am a trouble truffle hunter. I am not asserting this as a superior historical practice. It simply what i like to do. This is the practice to which my own peculiar career led me. I invariably had to start with the thing itself. And over and over again i learned that small objects lead to big stories. Now long before the invention of photography in 1839, people in the western half of the north American Continent used visual means to make sense of the world. In petroglyphs and paintings with ceramic vessels and. Evotional art but the settlement of the west in the United States largely coincides with the invention and spread of photography. The new american region and medium came of age and through photography Many Americans encountered the west for the first time. And photographs still shaped our mental images of the west. We imagine California Gold , dustbowlttlers farms. Nonetheless, as western historians we have been more apt to use these photographs as illustrations than to think about them as primary sources that help us answer central questions about the western past. We shape the contemporary conversations about how to understand photographs. Lets reclaim that turf. Lets ask from the perspective of our own field how might historians think about and with photographs . Now 19thcentury observers were quick to see a connection between photography and history, and as the historical profession move to Scientific Method in the late 19th century, photographs seem to be the perfect documents for this new age of objective fact. The essayist Oliver Wendell holmes, among the mediums most astute early critics, regarded photographs as aides that incidentally preserve the details that might not have interested contemporary observers. Theoretically, he wrote, a perfect photograph is absolutely inexhaustible. In a nod to the west he argued that the accidents of life left photographs and infinite charm. The oldest eastern city, in the myths of the shanties at pike speech and stretching across the courtyards of damascus, wherever man lives with the decencies of civilization, you will find the clothesline. Later in 1888, the local surgeon George Francis address the Antiquarian Society in worcester, massachusetts on photography as an aid to local history and called on amateur photographers to aid the work of future historians. He exhorted them to make a systematic Photographic Survey of new englands developing industries. And he explained there can be no question that photography is the best method of securing these graphic records. It is by far the most accurate, the cheapest of methods known at the present day. More than any other graphic process, he said, it was nearly free from error or prejudice of the operator. By 1902, one of the president s americanof the Historical Association put it dwell in an age of prose. Since darwin, it has been no more possible to produce a crop that it is for those who picture running horses to expel from the minds what they have learned the photographs of animal locomotion. Precision of photographs of galloping horses provided the evidence that historians needed for this history. They were useful antidote to what jamison called the presentations of human life that marked the writing of an earlier age. As 19thcentury commentators presumed, historians and photographers have a lot in common. And what bound them together was a commitment to scientific observation and the neutral recording of fact. Now though, we view these professions differently and we might observe it is the subjective observation of the world, not a purely objective one, that makes historians and photographers kindred spirits. Historians and photographers operate with different toolkits. There is no mistaking a pen for a camera, but they make similar decisions about whether to reveal their presence, what to highlight, what to exclude. Nonetheless, they stand in fundamentally different relationships to their subjects. Historians are always looking back. And photographers are always picturing a present, albeit an evanescent one that slips away the moment the sensitized plate or film is exposed. So consider the differences with which historians and photographers describe the world. Lets focus on a single photograph. For some time i have been exploring the stories made at fort laramie in the dakota territory in 1868 by Alexander Gardner. On either side of an unidentified girl stands six men, members of the Peace Commission to negotiate a peace treaty with tribes on the northern plains. Gardner made the picture as for part of the series that documents the work in the daily lives of the native peoples and mixedrace families that lived there. I pondered the challenges gardner faced in making the photograph, as opposed to those i faced in writing about it. I thought about what he knew in contrast to what i know. He knew how hot it was on this early may day. The weather records dont start for a few more months. He knew the sounds of these peoples voices. The men a for breakfast. He knew these people. But as an historian, i can know far more about their lives than he did. I can watch them walk into this picture and i can follow them as they walk away, out of a photographers site. With the tools of an historian, i can uncover connections that neither the photographer nor the subjects could fully discern. Know, for example, that the child, whose name he did not record, was sophie miss , and i can know that her uncle would become the Prime Minister of quebec. I can know that there was an army charge on a lakota village that resulted in the murder of sophies halfbrother. I can know that a raid in directly led to a marriage that would last to close to half a century and become sophies parents. I can know that her father is, at the moment this pictures been made, employing John B Sanborn , standing just to the right of sophie, as an attorney to get federal compensation for property lost in indian raids, and i can know that general sanborn, ostensibly representing the federal government in negotiating payments to the assembled tribes, will get a cut of that money if he can divert some of it to sophias father as compensation for some of his stolen horses. Is not to highlight my knowledge or demonstrate that historians of photographers can have different needs for the same picture. I want to also argue that historians have a fundamentally different relationship to time than photographers do. Both, of course, can observe temporal change as part of the immediate experience, but historians look the onslow personal. Observing events across time is fundamental to their craft our craft. Historians can compress actions occurring across space and time, and with the benefit of hindsight, they can recover moments and develop links between discrete events. And looking back they can reconsider people or events deemed uninteresting at the time, but valuable in retrospect. Remember the unnamed photographer . He might have inadvertently captured the clotheslines at pikes peak, but its up to the historian to explain whose clothes they were, and who washed them and hung them out to dry. If i could walk out alone the and hisriver with him subjects, i would surely learn something new in interesting about them all. Still, it is Historical Research that lets me know more about young sophies family, history , then gardner does in 1868, and because i can see into her familys future, i can know that her fathers lawsuits will remain unresolved when he dies more than 30 years later and i can know that one of her sons , the first to attend law school, will later press his grandfathers claims. The digital era, it is hard to shake assumptions about the literalism of photography that first attracted historians to it as a New Historical document. Photographs seemed to offer an unmediated glimpse of the past. Much we know about photographys ability or the ability to manipulate the scene. Are historical artifacts. But photographs they are not history itself. History is dynamic. Fluid. Inherently about change over time, and photographs are static. But their meanings change. In december of 1869, when general william t sherman, standing third from the left, thanked gardner for sending him copies of his fort laramie views, he highlighted the documentary value, writing that many of them are beautiful pictures, but the details will be valuable for some time to come. When the daughter of a sketch artist connected to the Peace Commissioners described the photograph more than half a century after it was made, she spoke of it more metaphorically as a ceremonial picture in the nature of a pledge to the future. On the 150th anniversary of the 1868 fort laramie treaty, gardners images served as the markers of broken promises. Photographs have a history of their own. And historians need to Pay Attention not just to the visual information they contain but to the context, materiality, and their shifting uses. Now every photograph is a moment seized from the continuum of now, every photograph is a moment seized from the continuum of flowing time and fixed for posterity. It focuses our attention on what we can see, and it can be tempting to decide something is important simply because we have a photograph of it. Civil war scholars note, for example, that the dictator has become wellknown, though it has little historical importance. Only because of several photographs made during the summer of 1864. And as western historians, we might ask, what stories do we emphasize, especially in textbooks . Because we can visualize them with photographs. Conversely, what stories might we overlook because there exists no photographs to anchor them in a particular time and place . Because we value the evidence we have at hand, we can be led to imagine that the moment fixed to the photographic image holds great explanatory power. But that is not always true. Photographs document consequences more readily than causes. They capture particular material subjects, but not abstract ideas. They depict fleeting moments, but they do not explain how they came about. Gardners photograph of the six Peace Commissioners standing with the young girl at fort laramie, for example, cannot tell us anything about the tense negotiations between the sioux and federal Peace Commissioners sent to force them on a reservation. It cannot hint at the betrayal that will follow seven years later when the federal government reneges on its promise to make the black hills a permanent part of the newly defined reservation. And it cannot predict the moment in 2016 when the federal board of geographic names will take general harneys name off the highest peak in the black hills and rename the mountain after the lakota prophet black elk. Nonetheless, this photograph of seven people, the oldest born during john adams administration, the youngest dying during Franklin Roosevelts presidency, invites the historian in to understand what is there and explore what is not. The photograph certainly drew me into the archives, and thats where i found sophies parents and discovered both of them came into fort laramie in the aftermath of general harneys attack on little thunders camp at ash follow in 1855. Harneys actions set in motion the events that led them to meet, marry, and raise a large family. His frontier violence triggered their frontier love. The photograph alone does not tell that story. But it does lead me there. Over the past 50 years, as photography has become an increasingly ubiquitous part of modern life, the medium has drawn increasing attention from critics and become central to a host of disciplinary subfields , including visual anthropology, media studies, visual culture, visual studies. But these fields all focused largely on the analysis of contemporary images, not historical ones. And even in fields like memory studies, where historical images can play a central role, the place of photographs remains unexplored. Photographs can be handmade to what we call collective memory, a deeply felt set of convictions resistant to change. And they can also be handmades of history, which employs a more skeptical and critical view of the past. Photographs are not inherently one thing or the other. They derive their meanings from the ways we use them. American textbooks, for example, have long celebrated the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad with photographs like east and west shaking hands at a rail, which depicts the celebrants of the golden spikes ceremony of 1869, but excludes the chinese laborers who made most of the tracks from california east to utah. In the late 19th century, andrew j. Russells iconic picture supported the evolving collective memory of the Transcontinental Railroad as a triumph of american industry. In recent years, however, as historians turn away from the this triumph us narrative, the photograph finds a new place in historical writing. Once valued as evidence of the nations technological prowess, the photograph now has value because its the very exclusion of the Chinese Workers reveals so much to us so much about contemporary racial thought. Historical photographs shape our more personal reckoning of the western past, as well. I first saw yellowstone through 19th century photographs, and i anticipated that my first visit would trigger a rush of familiarity. It did, but i was shocked. The place had green trees and blue skies. I had no idea. These old 1870s photographs had made the place recognizable to me. But their monochrome tones had also made the 19th century west seem unduly remote from my own experience. Gardners photographic subjects at fort laramie experience their world in color. I need to remember that. Their world was not so far away from mine as i might imagine. My mother reminds me that she was alive during sophie moussas lifetime and sophie stands in this picture with a man born before lewis and clark headed west. So, the history of the American West is short indeed. I stand just two degrees of separation, two lifetimes from general harney, a military man with a violent temper, whom i actually do not want to meet. [laughter] writing about photographs in 1980, the french critic roland barth described an element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. Ill concede the visceral response to a photograph can spark a good novel or a good film. But imaginative responses are responses to photographs are not the same as historical responses. Imaginative responses favor feeling over analytic thought. They draw attention back to the viewer and away from the photograph itself. Historians and nonhistorians alike might gaze with curiosity at the child whom gardner left unidentified in the photograph. In this photograph. She commands attention because she looks different from the men who stand by her, by virtue of her gender, her size, her age, and her ethnicity. And because she meets the cameras gaze with an unflinching calm. But the historian needs to push beyond that initial curiosity to tackle the who, what, why, where, when, and how of it all. Its the historians task to figure out who the child is and to resist that impulse to view her as an emblem or metaphor and to instead establish her as a person with a rich history of her own. There is nothing wrong with historical empathy. But as historians, we need to bolster our empathy with research. Sophie never saw gardners picture of her. His photographs didnt circulate back to indian country. But emerging academic conversations about visual sovereignty, representational jurisdiction, and indigenous media remind us, of course, that native peoples have long been involved in the production and circulation of visual images. And the needs of native subjects and nonnative photographers dont always converge. In the early 1980s, an Indian School in south dakota interviewed local sioux about their ancestors, who had been photographed over a century earlier. The 1877 government catalog described associated tribal groups as people who had made more substantial progress in civilizations. Many of them having permanently discarded their indian habits and dress. But a century later, Community Members recalled their relatives differently. Struck by whom you see on the right here, they explain it was no assimilationist. Similarly, smutty bear on the left was an expert hunter who resisted federal policy. These family stories shift the meaning of 19th century portraits, photographs tossed out into the world as evidence of a vanishing race get pulled back in as emblems of family pride. Photographs may be stable objects, but they do have unstable meanings, and tracking the shifting workpaper form over time and in different contexts, that is the job for a historian. Most historians, if they think about photographs at all, focus on them as images, not material objects, and as illustrations, rather than as primary sources that should be the subject of historical analysis. Watch ken burns 1996 series on the west and Pay Attention to its treatment of the pueblo revolt of 1680. While he carefully uses 17th and 18th century engravings of spaniards to visualize his story, he relies on 19th and 20th century whoops, sorry whoa. I gave away my story there. I was trying to highlight this picture here. He relies on 19th and 20th century photographs to depict the pueblo protagonists. This approach conveys an insidious image. European people change with time. One would never use images from two centuries later to depict them. But native peoples live on in an unchanging past. A photograph made 240 years later is just fine. And we are susceptible to this ahistorical use of photographs when we do not know better. I like to imagine that burns viewers realize that Motion Picture footage of a hopi snake dance could not actually depict the pueblo revolt of 1680. But my students presume they saw 17th century dancers performing in front of a movie camera. And i know theyre not alone. To move beyond the uncritical use of photographs as illustrations and engage them as primary source documents, we need to give our digital students a greater familiarity with photographic technologies and formats so that they can better understand what photographs could and could not capture, who had the wherewithal to make photographs, how photographs circulated. We need to perceptualize the familiar world and help them appreciate how revolutionary this technology is. The enlarged pool of digital picture takers is profoundly reshaping how the American West is now being photographed, and how it will be understood through photographic evidence in the future. We also need to reiterate for our students the point i just made. Photographic meaning is not fixed. Historians follow people and places, events, and ideas through time. That is the hallmark of our trade and we need to follow photographs through time too. We need to be aware that we exist at a tail end of a continuum of viewers who have encountered any particular photograph, and that our needs from the images differs from theirs. Its hard, for example, to look at this 1872 washington, d. C. , studio portrait of chief bigfoot without also visualizing the photograph of the frozen body made in the immediate aftermath of the massacre at wounded knee 18 years later. And its hard also to stare at a photograph of the Young Hawaiian schoolboy barack obama without also seeing who he will become. Photographs depict moments pregnant with possibilities. But by the time we look at them with our historians curiosity about the past, the range of possibilities has narrowed. The time captured in a photograph stands still, but for the historian, it continues to unfold. And so a photograph of the twin towers rising over Lower Manhattan cannot be the same kind of document it was before 2001. Now it took me a long time to reckon with the shifting meanings of unchanging photographs. For years, i worked on a collection of the mexicanamerican war, lost between 1847 and the rediscovery in 1981. The worlds first photographs of war, and arguably the earliest examples of photojournalism in the world, they are astonishing artifacts, each in the phrase of the age, a mirror with a memory. This plate was there, on a saltillo street more than 170 years ago, when light bounced off of wool and left a lasting impression on the sensitized surface. It offers an extraordinary kind of evidence. But in 1847, nobody cared. I finally had to reckon with these daguerreotypes, in time, rather than through time, suspending my own personal interest in them, because despite their astonishing detail, these daguerreotypes could not convey the kind of narrative drama that antebellum americans expect from visual images. The small type of the bleak gravesite of henry clay jr. , killed at the battle of buena vista, could not compete in either narrative detail or visual appeal with Something Like this hand colored lithograph of his death. Issued by nathaniel currier. The print artist here had tools akin to those that historians have. The print artist could look back with hindsight to compress time, invent drama, and focus on a decisive moment to depict a noble and patriotic death. He could use printed words down at the bottom to describe with precision the content of his image. And the daguerreotypes could do none of this. So these long, unseen daguerreotypes lead us to larger stories about the early inception of photography in the ways in which american struggled to understand this new medium. But if photographs can help us uncover americans slope embrace of the medium, they could also help us track when the attitude changed. In 1867, Alexander Gardner titled this photograph made for the Kansas Pacific Railway titled this photograph westward, the course of empire, a decision that points not just to the ubiquity of the phrase, but to the ways in which americans could now read the meaning of a locomotive pointed west at the far end of a newly laid track. In the 20 years since the mexicanamerican war, the increasing number of photographs in the United States, spurred by the invention of a negative technology that allowed for the production of multiple paper prints, had familiarized americans with these sorts of images. Now, most photographs in the late 19th century west couldnt invoke the obvious metaphorical vocabulary of gardners railroad scene. But in the late 1850s, as photographers began producing paper prints, they began using words to direct viewers readings of their pictures. Timothy osullivans photograph of a part park in Sierra Blanca range, arizona, might seem to be a little bit more of a scenic view. But the caption explains the picture offers proof that white people can now enter the area because hostile apaches have been banished from their former home. So, words and images together convey the point. The most important aspect of the picture is what you dont see. And these photographic captions mark an innovation that has been rarely studied, even by historians who favor literary evidence over the visual. But they remind us, when we look at 19th century photographs as primary sources for our work, we must look at the image and assess the materiality of the photograph. But we also need to read. Now, historians often encounter photographs in places we call archives. And the very term archive is a slippery one. And we might usefully imagine a distinction between the archive and the archives. The former, the archive, is described by french theorists, has more metaphorical meanings. The second refers to the brick and mortar places where records are described and stored. As philosophers have referred to us as the power relations described in the archive, we might also be attentive to the ways in which power relationships are inscribed in the brickandmortar archives as well. The physical institutions that house large collections of historical photographs of the American West preserve the power inequities inherent in the collections they acquire. And these are inequities that mirror those of western american life, including those between people with money and cameras and those without, and those between people who can refuse to be photographed and those who cannot. A vast category that might include those in reservations, include subjects on reservations, prisons, detention centers, and even children. Photography is often called the democratic art. But just as not everyone had the wherewithal to make a photograph, not every person or place received the same kind of photographic attention. Economic interest dictated that mid19th century california , for example, would be better documented than the new mexico territory, small towns better documented than more rural spaces of indian territory. People with fixed residences pictured more than migrant workers. Government interests also shape the photographic record of the 19th century west. For tuckerman photographers headed to the great federal surveys of the 1860s and 1870s and documented transportation routes and Natural Resources in service to the expansionist policies of state. And in washington, d. C. , studio photographers, who made portraits of visiting indian leaders, produced pictures that would be used to support the governments assimilationist policies. Collections of photographs thus contained particular structural biases before they enter the brickandmortar archives that collect the materials. And in these archives, whether they are academic, public, or commercial operations, additional decisions get made about access, cataloging, and preservation that further shape the possibility for an historians work. Now, the digital turn, the digital turn presents two broad and enormous challenges for historians who would use photographs. On the one hand, theres a question of how to think about born digital photographs, a term used in opposition to analog photographs, which are produced with chemical processes and possess a physical and material form. And on the other, theres the question of how to figure out digital archives. Both those composed entirely of digital materials and those created as older materials are converted to digital formats. Born digital photographs constitute virtually all of the photographs being made today. People made an estimated 1. 2 trillion digital photographs in 2017. And one researcher estimates that every two minutes, we take as many photographs as the whole of humanity in the 19th century. This is way too many pictures for a researcher to reckon with , way too many for us to reckon with in any meaningful way. And even with help from artificial intelligence, whose programmed interests are almost surely not the same as ours, it is hard to imagine how to make effective use of such an enormous collection of digital images, or assess the integrity of any individual image. Were in the midst of a tectonic shift here, and it is hard to say how the emerging skepticism about the veracity of digital images will retroactively alter our faith in historical photographs. Even familiar photographs can be rendered intellectually unrecognizable in digital iterations. The gardner photograph i am writing about exists in several different digital archives, sometimes adequately identified and sometimes not. In one commercial archive, gardners name is completely erased, replaced with a credit line that simply tracks the corporate corporate ownership of this image. The website provides no location for the original. And provides intellectual access to the picture with such decidedly unuseful subject headings as teenager, group of men, land. [laughter] prof. Sandweiss and it offers to sell you a copy of the picture, whose original is uncopyrighted, for 499. Now, the integrity of the digital image presents one challenge. And the integrity of a digital archive the other. Digitized archives tend to erase all records of their own construction. In a physical archive, a patient person can plow through the boxes of a particular collection and presume they have covered it all. But users of a digital archive, a digitized archive, are hardpressed to understand the relationship between what is online and whats in the real or figurative storage boxes. Online archives function as metanyms, standins for the physical archives. But the relationship is rarely clear. The digitization of old photographs, of course, has its virtues. It provides greater access to materials, minimizes the wear and tear on fragile pictures, and promotes new ways of working with digital records. And often, at least in academic and institutional archives, the digital archives do include enough metadata to let one make smart use of a digitized photograph. But commercial archives generally include less data. They focus on the image while ignoring the materiality of photographic print. And they push historians back to thinking about photographs as mere illustrations, and make it difficult to engage them as physical objects or as primary sources that in and of themselves raise historical questions. Commercial archives also exercise invisible forms of censorship. Ive been watching what happens since bill gates sold his image licensing company, corbis images, to visual china group in january 2016. The corbis images of the Tiananmen Square protests in june, 1989, were once readily accessible. Now, although the Chinese Corporation that bought them has an american outlet, they are not. Its a valuable lesson. Large commercial image archives reach viewers through mediated Search Engines that are subject to censorship and control. And unlike the prospective researcher who might be turned away from a bricks and mortar archive, online researchers might never know they are missing anything. So, historians tempted by the digital turn need to be wary. Digital archives, especially commercial ones, can actually impede Historical Research. What kind of historical source is a pixelated image whose creator we cant identify, whose original form we cannot discern, whose integrity we cant confirm, and whose purpose we cant figure out . What kind of source is an archive whose scope we cannot determine, whose political and economic ambitions are concealed from view . The problems of digital images aside, there exists billions of photographs produced before the invention of digital photography, with more made in the western United States than any scholar could examine in a lifetime. I cannot think of a comparable source for doing western American History, one so large and so little used. I fell into thinking about photographs 40 years ago, more or less by chance. And i from far and wide since then. But now im back, and i have to say the field is as wide open as it was when i began. New historical concerns compel us to ask new questions of that enormous corpus of western photographs. And our new questions invest old objects with new meanings. Historical photographs now can help us understand climate change, the mechanics of colonialism, the ins and outs of immigration policy, the policing of national borders, and the assimilationist projects of the federal government. They can lead us deep into family histories and community stories, into legislative agendas and corporate policies. But historical photographs can also lead us back to trouble. Truffles, the little stories that matter. And characters long forgotten. Alexander gardners photograph of seven people assembled at fort laramie on a midspring day in 1868 has led me to believe people to connected to the men we see here. And so ive encountered an enslaved woman named hannah, who was whipped to death. And hannah said life has led me to st. Louis and the practice of slavery in the gateway city. Ive met a young cheyenne ward of a colonel, and her brief life helped us understand a tangled web of antislavery activists and indian policy reformers. Of course, i have been led to sophie, whose first marriage to a white Civil War Veteran and second marriage to a mixedrace lakota man, who produced 13 children. And whose life helps us uncover the diminishing opportunities available to mixedrace families in the west as multiple color lines hardened in the wake of reconstructions collapse. Photographs help us answer hard questions, but they also help us expand the cast of characters who populate the west and make our stories richer and more inclusive. Over the past few decades, ive had fun roaming the fields of western history and the west itself, and exploring the photographic archives. The big metaphorical ones and the brick and mortar ones, too. But you know what . It can feel lonely out there. We need more historians to care about photographs. So please, come join me. I promise its really a fun ride. Thank you so much. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [applause] youre watching American History tv all weekend, every weekend on cspan3. In july of 1948, the World Health Organization held its First Assembly meeting in geneva, switzerland. News,t, as the who makes we present a United Nations film made within the organizations founding year after documenting the history of human diseases and Health Problems crated by an increase in world travel. Describes how the plan to coordinate global efforts to fight disease. Playing] deliver us, deliver us from the plague, from hunger,ro