Photography’s Viewers, Photography’s Histories

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cara A. Finnegan
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Rhetorical History ◽  
Specific Level ◽  
Common Concern ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Depression

This book has investigated how viewer engagement with photography happens at the local, historically specific level. It has shown how, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, photography shaped a collective consciousness that enabled viewers to negotiate anxieties of the period, from war, poverty, and economic depression to national identity and citizenship. By closely reading traces of viewers' encounters with photography, the book has written a rhetorical history of photographic viewership showing that viewers were active agents who used their experiences of photography to deliberate about issues of common concern. This conclusion reflects on what such project tells us about the nature of the viewer, how it challenges our definitions of what a photograph is, and how the rhetorical study of viewership enriches our histories of photography. It argues that viewership is not the same in all places and situations; rather, it emerges from the photographic encounter in ways that are simultaneously contextual, communal, contestable, and contingent.

Viewers Reading Photographs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cara A. Finnegan
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Child Labor ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Economic Depression ◽  
Magazine Articles

This book examines the complex and historically specific relationships that shape viewers' participation in photography. Focusing on the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression, the book analyzes the discourse produced by viewers in response to specific photographs they encountered in public. It considers a number of cases where viewers left evidence of their responses in newspaper and magazine articles, letters to the editor, trial testimony, books, speeches, photographs, and comment cards left at an exhibit. It shows that encounters with photography fostered in viewers a rhetorical consciousness—that is, “a manner of thinking that invents possibilities for persuasion, conviction, action, and judgment”—which they performed not only by describing or evaluating the photographs they encountered but also by mobilizing a sophisticated (though often implicit) rhetorical repertoire that grounded their arguments about war, empire, national identity, child labor, citizenship, and economic depression.

Natchez Pilgrimages

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-16
Author(s):  
Susan T. Falck
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Tourism Product ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Memories

The introduction provides historical background on Natchez, Mississippi, and the town’s most famous heritage tourism product, the Natchez Pilgrimage, founded in the early 1930s. Similar to earlier expressions of historical memory in Natchez, the Pilgrimage home tours and pageants represented the romanticized values of the Old South and its Lost Cause. The town’s public and private historical memory following the Civil War through the Great Depression in the form of letters, emancipation parades, associations, militia groups, photography and other popular amusements are discussed. The history of the town in the aftermath of the Civil War and its impact on the formerly enslaved, the white planter class, elite free blacks, and social conditions following the war through the Great Depression are noted. The idea that historical memories are constantly in flux and frequently contested is discussed.

Planning on the Potomac: A Review Essay on Jason E. Taylor’s Deconstructing the Monolith: The Microeconomics of the National Industrial Recovery Act

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 244-264
Author(s):  
Joshua K. Hausman
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Working Hours ◽  
Fair Competition ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Econometric Evidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Recovery Act

Taylor (2019) details heterogeneity in the effects of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) across industries and across time. Through first the President’s Reemployment Act (PRA) and then industry-specific “codes of fair competition,” the NIRA raised wages and restricted working hours. In some—but far from all—cases industries also used a NIRA code to collude, raising prices and restricting output. The effect of the NIRA peaked in fall 1933 and winter 1934; thereafter, compliance declined. I review the intellectual history of the NIRA, the implementation of the PRA and the NIRA codes, and Taylor’s econometric evidence on their effects. I end with a discussion of the implications of Taylor’s book for understanding the effect of the NIRA on US recovery from the Great Depression. (JEL D72, G01, H50, N32, N42)

Our Daily Bread: ‘Cooperation’, ‘Independence’ and Politics in Mid-1930s Cinema

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Neve
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cooperative Activity ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter revisits and explores the production history of director King Vidor’s independently made movie, Our Daily Bread (1934), its ideological and aesthetic motifs, and its exhibition and reception in the United States and beyond, not least its apparent failure at the box office. It further considers the relationship between the film and contemporary advocacy of cooperative activity as a response to the Great Depression, notably by the California Cooperative League, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign for the state governorship. It also assesses the movie in relation to Vidor’s own cooperative vision through its emphasis on individuals and community as a solution to the Great Depression and the significant absence of the state in this agency.

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