Toward the Visualization of History: The Past as Image (review)

Since the 1970s, new objectives, issues, and approaches for history have been renovating historical scholarship, incorporating claims from a diversity of groups, communities, and social movements that took the public sphere during the 1960s. A good example of this renovation can be found in the field of oral history and its concern with a great variety of issues such as memory, the uses of the past, historical consciousness, commemorations, community-based issues, and new understandings of visualization. With these new approaches, listening and seeing were considered skills closely related to the experience of existing in contemporary society, especially about issues related to media, popular culture, and artifacts.

Mark Moss' book presents an important contribution in this field of research. He relates academic history to public history and also challenges the traditional historical scholarship to incorporate the world of popular culture.

His book includes an introduction, eight chapters, and a conclusion, followed by a bibliography of important references in a great variety of fields, such as visual history, historical epistemology, education, cognitive psychology, media studies, computer studies, photography, film and television studies, communication, and cultural studies.

Three main issues can be raised from Moss' work that are closely related to the renovation of the writing of history mentioned above: first is the concern that media forms the basis of contemporary memory, for which we need to find conceptual tools; second is his position that academic history does not own the monopoly for the interpretation of the past because popular culture and the media play an important role in this process; and finally, that it is possible to produce a serious and substantive historical scholarship with technology, where the visualization of the past can take place either in cinemas or in classrooms.

These issues orient the discussions among the chapters. In the first chapter, "Visual Cultural and Historical Consciousness," Moss analyzes the development of visual culture during the twentieth century and the way different kinds of media have contributed to shaping the contemporary understanding of the past, thereby creating a new historical consciousness. The central aspect of the first chapter is to call attention to the current common experience that history is learned as much through visual media as from textbooks. How to deal with this challenge is an objective of the book. Concentrating his reflections on cognitive learning, this chapter also deals with the opposition between academic history and public history; the ways Hollywood shapes the past; and how children and young people learn today.

In the second chapter, "Media, Memory and History," Moss adopts a historical perspective, showing how visualization is an important way for shaping social memory and creating historical representations in different societies. Although Moss does not invest in a clear differentiation between the concept of memory and history, he notes that nowadays visual media creates narratives that shape representations of the past while also framing how contemporary society remembers.

The third chapter, "The Future and Past of Print Culture," presents the history of the book and discusses how historically the practices of reading and literacy were shaped. He also analyzes the impact of the digital media on the practices of reading. Finally, this chapter deals with the preservation of historical data with the development of digital technology.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 develop a historical approach to analyzing the role played by photographs, films, and television toward the visualization of history. In "Photographing History," he identifies photographs as historical evidence and an important place for the elaboration of contemporary social memory. He discusses the evolution of this media and its capacity in producing art and documenting human experience and stresses its importance in the creation of a new visual culture for the twentieth century. The central aspect of this chapter is to analyze the role photographs play in representing historical facts, especially through the press' coverage of wars.

"Visions of the Past: Film and History" analyzes movies and the way they imagine the past. Here the...