viz. - American history

Image Database Review: New York City Department of Records Online Image Gallery

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 15:49:22 +0000

During November and December I'll be devoting some blog posts to reviews of image archives recently added to the viz. "Images" resource page. First up is the gallery from the New York City Department of Records released in April 2012. The archive "provides free and open research access to over 800,000 items digitized from the Municipal Archives’ collections, including photographs, maps, motion-pictures and audio recordings." It is from the research perspective that I approach this review. Alan Taylor, at The Atlantic's photography blog In Focus, included some highlights he found while browsing the archive (warning: images include evidence photography from homicide crime scenes). Browsing through the images is certainly a good way to spend some time (perhaps too much time), but the archive is also organized through a series of collections that can help the viewer sift through the nearly one million images from the Big Apple.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

Users access the archive through the LUNA interface, and can choose to either browse by collection or search by keyword. I'll discuss the search function after exploring the curated categories. LUNA provides embedding and linking function to help share the images users find in the archive. By signing up for an account, users can also use LUNA to create sideshow presentations. After clicking on the "Enter the Online Gallery" link, the user is presented with the LUNA interface. A sidebar on the left links to the collections, a center frame provides selected "featured" images, and a menu bar at the top of the interface links to the collections, sharing and presentation functions.

Image Credit: Jack Rosenzwieg

The collections provide a helpful point of entry into the vast database, though the collections themselves are many in number. The collections are drawn from a variety of sources: administrative departments within the city government (the Board of Education, Department of Parks and Recreation, Sanitation and Street Cleaning, etc.), political offices (various NYC mayors and Borough presidents), the District Attorney's office and Police Department. There is a collection for images from maps and atlases of the city. The archive also houses materials from the NYC Unit of the federal WPA Writers' Project.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

The collection names do give a general idea of their contents, but the collections hold many images that are not immediately connected to the originating office or program. For example, the political office collections unsurprisingly hold thousands of images of mayors speaking to the people of New York, glad-handing constituents and otherwise engaged in the activities of their office. But, they also include images related to larger political, cultural and historical context of the mayors' eras. For example, the LaGuardia collection includes some anti-German WWII propaganda, such as John Hawkins' photo of Dan Daniels sculpture of Hitler crushing screaming victims in his hand.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

Other surprises can be found in the Sanitation and Street cleaning collection, which, as you might expect, includes images related to sewers and garbage collection. However, its holdings include many older images, "contain[ing] ... 30,000 acetate (4x5), & some 8x10 glass & acetate negatives and 280 glass (5x7), and 360 lantern slides from its precursor agency the Department of Street Cleaning." Unfortunately most of these images are not available through the online interface, but those that are give a glimpse into the history of public works in New York City, such as this lantern slide of men working on a garbage barge circa the turn of the twentieth century.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

The collections also include a massive project undertaken in the 1980s by the Department of Finance. As described in the archive, the Department of Finance photographed every building and lot in the five NYC Boroughs for tax assessment purposes, updating photos previously taken in 1939 and 1940. These collections could help those interested in architecture, the development of the city over time, or just feeling nostalgic for 1980s movies filmed in New York.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

There are a couple of caveats when it comes to the research utility of the archive. First, the amount of metadata provided varies from image to image. The varying quality and quantity of metadata may be due in part to the diverse sources and range of historical eras from which the images come. It makes sense that records from, say, the New York Police Department in 1913 might be limited compared to those available from more recent sources. However, more recent sources do not always provide copious data with their images. The image of Mayor Giuliani from 13 December 1996 above, for instance, contains no information about the people surrounding the mayor or the subject of the event at which he speaks. Images with limited metadata can impede the usefulness of the search function.

Image Credit: Screenshot of LUNA zoom function

The second caveat is about the limited quality of many of the images. The Department of Records offers users the opportunity to purchase high quality prints or high quality digital images for publication purposes. Depending on the research purposes of a given user, lack of higher quality images may pose more or less of a limitation. The LUNA interface allows the user to zoom in on images, but as seen in the image above, when the image quality is low, the zoom is of limited use. Using the Giuliani example again, it is difficult to make out the faces of those standing behind the mayor.

These limits, however, should be balanced against the convenience of online access and the sheer number of artifacts available to the user.

I Made America, You're All Welcome!

Rachel Schneider — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00:08 +0000

Image Credit: I Made America

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one person to distract herself from work, Facebook provides. Through the The Second City Network I found a video entitled “Founding Fathers History Pick-Up Lines.” Clearly, I couldn’t resist. I was deeply amused to watch Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, and John Adams seduce modern women with such lines as “It’s not the Louisiana Purchase, but it will double in size,” “Never leave for tomorrow what you can screw today,” and “I take the virgin out of Virginia.” The full video below features many more salacious lines, some of which might not be SFW:

More delightful than the video itself was discovering that it is part of a much larger undertaking. I Made America is a transmedia project that relies on multiple media to tell one story: how Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, and John Adams were kidnapped from the past, brought to 2012 Chicago, and the adventures that followed. Transmedia, as described by Henry Jenkins, “represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.” This scattered content then “offers backstory, maps the world, offers us other character’s perspectives on the action, or deepens audience engagement.”

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

In I Made America’s case, a series of videos shows how the Founding Fathers adapt to their new circumstances after being abandoned by the American Revolutionaries for Freedom and Family Super PAC, who brought them to the present to endorse conservative causes. Their modern lives include keg stands, romantic intrigues, drunken bar brawls, open mic nights, and even enhanced science-fiction dioramas. Yet the videos can’t contain the whole story—as the Founders wander about Chicago, their activities are recorded on various social media platforms, which are collated and archived on the series’ website. Fans can thus follow their favorites from Facebook and Twitter into real life interactions with the characters at birthday parties and Cubs games.

Image Credit: Screenshot from It is better to be alone than in bad company

Transmedia thus makes possible new kinds of personalized fan experience. An I Made America fan can watch the first episode, then check out Franklin’s video blogs, read Hamilton’s Tumblr, download Jefferson’s music, and follow Madison’s Twitter feed. The series’ heavy social media presence, however, means that fans can not only produce fanart but also share it with the objects of that art directly.

Image Credit: Polks

Their interactions even have the power to solicit new content: as Benjamin Franklin often eats Pop-Tarts during the episodes, one fan texted Franklin to ask if he had ever put a whole Pop-Tart in his mouth. He then attempted to do so on video, challenged others to respond, and then George Washington posted video of his officemate Caroline attempting the feat. The audience can move from passive reception to active participation.

Image Credit: @GoingMadison

However, what is the purpose of such transmedia projects? If transmedia allows audiences greater interactivity with texts, what kinds of experiences does this make possible? And what distinguishes I Made America from earlier (and more conventionally produced) projects like The Blair Witch Project? According to the original video pitch, I Made America is “not about selling a product, but about telling a story. A story of fiction, reality, comedy, politics, and America.” While comedy predominates, its bent is frequently satirical; we can laugh at the sheer silliness of Benjamin Franklin saying “You’re welcome for French ladies,” but Hamilton demanding “Why don’t you vote?” points out the consistent failure of Americans to participate in the political process.

As the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence remain central to American political discourse, remediating and reimagining the Founders through embodied performance calls into question what we understand America to be. Right now, it’s not just fictional groups like A.R.F.F. who feel like they best understanding the Founding Fathers, it’s also political movements like the Tea Party and legal practitioners of originalism that imagine 2012 America should be governed like its 1788 counterpart. I Made America challenges this by imagining how Thomas Jefferson might answer Newt Gingrich’s assertions of what Jefferson might do, as well as suggesting how inadequately the Founders might be prepared to deal with twenty-first century realities.

At the first season’s end, I Made America’s initial light plot turns serious as John Adams begins a presidential re-election campaign and as viewers learn that A.R.F.F. holds Madison captive. What will happen next can only be predicted through another founder’s words: in this case, I Made America’s creator Mark Muszynski, who planned the series to run “alongside the upcoming election so it can respond in real time to things that are actually happening in our world.” So far, Adams has made a campaign stop at Occupy Chicago and received his former Vice President’s musical endorsement. As fans continue to spread the word about I Made America, I can only wait to see what happens next. Perhaps Hamilton, Adams’s campaign manager, can learn some Chicago-style savvy from @mayoremanuel. I don’t think he needs help with the cursing, though.

The Composition of Popular Romance: Gone with the Wind's Storyboards

Rachel Schneider — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:23:57 +0000

Image Credit: Rachel Schneider

After a crash of cymbals, the bright brass instruments build to a climax until the violins enter: so begins “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Pulitzer-prize winning novel was a legitimate phenomenon before the movie, but the 1939 film is an artistic achievement on its own merits. Gone with the Wind was one of the first movies chosen for preservation by the National Film Registry in part because of its rich history. Gone with the Wind not only holds the record for the highest box office ever (when adjusted for inflation), but also held the rest for most Academy Awards (10) until 1960. Numerous books and documentaries recount the tangled history of the film’s production, which was plagued with cast battles, multiple directors, expensive delays, screenplay revisions, and a battle with the Hays Office to preserve an infamous final line. Much of the material for this work comes from the Harry Ransom Center’s extensive David O. Selznick Collection, which contains not only the producer’s numerous papers but also various production materials from his films.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The Harry Ransom Center not only features this collection in past and future exhibitions, but also displays its contents on its windows, which show several of the film’s storyboards on the Center’s north and northeast walls. What the storyboards can tell us both about film history and Gone with the Wind itself is something I want to briefly examine here.

As discussed by Alan David Vertrees in his book Selznick’s Vision: Gone with the Wind and Hollywood Filmmaking, David Selznick and Gone with the Wind are central to the history of cinematic production design. Selznick created the title “production designer” for William Cameron Menzies, the man who drew Gone with the Wind’s storyboards—drawings which suggested the flow and look of each scene. Gone with the Wind was one of the first live action pictures to be entirely storyboarded. Thus, while production designers were originally responsible for scenic design only, Menzies influenced Gone with the Wind’s entire look, including color, lighting, composition, and camera movement. His achievement garnered him a special Academy Award for “outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood in the production of Gone with the Wind.” The film’s original trailer gives some sense of what Menzies accomplished:

The Harry Ransom Center’s windows show storyboards depicting the film’s fire sequence, which a Gallup poll of North American audience members deemed its most memorable episode. However, the Ransom Center’s archives also include storyboards of other sequences, and I took this opportunity to delve into the Selznick Collection’s storyboards to learn more about what storyboarding in Hollywood’s golden age entailed, and what effects these visuals might have.

Searching through several boxes of Gone with the Wind storyboards held within the Selznick Collection, I was interested to note their variety. Some of the boards (like the ones for the fire scene) were relatively compact squares; others, like the ones I found portraying the Twelve Oaks barbecue that takes place early in the movie, are more substantial: made entirely of wood, at least a foot across in length, and reasonably heavy. My photograph here tries to capture what these storyboards actually look like.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Despite their age, their colors are quite striking, as the storyboard depicting the O’Hara family’s arrival at Twelve Oaks shows.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Menzies incorporates various color palettes into the film to visually highlight the differences among the film’s early antebellum scenes, the later stark Civil War sequence, and the bleak Reconstruction period. However, Menzies often doubles the heroine’s fiery personality with reds: Scarlett’s flight from Atlanta is illuminates by the flaming buildings around her; a burning sky backlights her defiant declaration that she’ll “never be hungry again”; the burgundy ball gown she wears to Ashley’s birthday party after being caught embracing him marks her as a scarlet woman.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The color palette also is distinguished from particularly difficult scenes where Scarlett shoots a Union officer, or faces assault from men in the Shantytown near her mills. The storyboards do not illustrate the scenes in detail, but provide a sketch for what it should look like. Pencil lines are still visible among the color.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

These storyboards are uniquely valuable not only for their place in film history, but also for thinking more about how artists like Menzies and Selznick visually composed Gone with the Wind’s epic romance. The “sketchness” of the storyboards conveys some of the sense of fragility inherent in the film’s narrative. By movie’s end, Scarlett is forced to rethink all her ambitions and desires, to recognize both the fragility of her world and her own mistaken understandings of Rhett and Ashley. Her narrative resembles the mental acts of revision that Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy undergo in Pride and Prejudice, but with a more complicated finale: instead of uniting, she and Rhett part. Gone with the Wind perverts conventional romance by denying love at the close.

Yet, the film’s last shots complicate the trailer’s claim that “the screen has never known a love story to compare with this, when Rhett Butler meets Scarlett O’Hara.” Instead of despairing when she loses Melanie and Rhett, the people who loved and supported her, Scarlett’s face and the music express hope as she and the viewer both realize her truest love: Tara, her family’s home. It is Tara that provides her the strength to assert that “tomorrow is another day,” and the final shot of Scarlett standing outside her family home, posed against a sky filled with red clouds takes the viewer back to her refusal to give up in the face of poverty, hunger, and despair. Menzies’s visual logic makes Gone with the Wind more than a love story between a man and a woman; it is instead a love letter to America, written to Americans shaken by the Great Depression. Gone with the Wind celebrates both a defiant land and the hopes of the people who populated it. In representing the film through Scarlett’s escape from a burning Atlanta on their windows, the Harry Ransom Center embraces Gone with the Wind as an American narrative worthy of further study.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

"Putting the 'Man' in 'Manifest Destiny!'": Making Populist Iconography and Queer Historiography in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

Rachel Schneider — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 02:24:07 +0000

Image Credit: Theatre is Easy

Even though my Rhetoric of the Musical class has finished up, I can’t quit musicals. When I heard that Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a musical I’d discovered when I was preparing my class, was moving to Broadway, I decided that it was the perfect karotic moment to tackle this rich topic. The musical’s Gothic visuals, emo music, and satirical presentation of American politics combine to bring audiences to consider not only American populism but also the act of history making itself.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson covers the career of Andrew Jackson: America’s seventh president, a military hero, a virulent racist, and the first President to claim he was born in a log cabin. However, it doesn’t try to tell the story straight in the way 1776 shows the writing of the Declaration of Independence. The musical’s opening lines set the tone for the evening as irreverent, profane, and visceral: “I’m wearing some tight tight jeans and tonight we’re delving into some serious, serious shit. I’m Andrew Jackson. I’m your President. Let’s go!” The song that follows, “Populism Yea Yea,” establishes the musical’s major concerns: the role of the President as Celebrity-in-Chief, America’s complicated relationship with power and populism, and how these concerns connect to the present day:

The rocking beat, along with the choreographed hip swivels and raised fists, don’t just help draw our attention to lead actor Ben Walker’s sexy Jackson and his tight t-shirt. They also attempt to capture the energy of populist sentiment, as strong today as it was in the 1830s when Jackson was elected. The lyrics blend the concerns of then with now, as the show’s cowboys and cowgirls offer to “take this country back / For people like us / Who don’t just think about things, / People who make things happen.” This language—emphasizing us versus them, action versus thought—could have come as easily from Bush’s western-inflected mouth as from a Tea Party pamphlet. What’s also remarkable here in the way that populist energy is associated with teenage angst: “Why wouldn’t you ever go out with me in school? / You always went out with those guys / Who thought they were so cool / And I was just nobody to you.” Here, the writers indirectly connect populist disaffection with the rebellion of lonely youth, left out by the “elite” who will be forced to “eat our dust.” This might seem a stretch, but the political nature of the musical hasn’t just been noted by New York Times review Ben Brantley, but has also been acknowledged by the show’s lead, the show's co-creator Alex Timbers, and the show's composer-lyricist Michael Friedman:

“Alex [Timbers, the show’s co-creator] and I had both been interested in historical figures and in ways of looking through a contemporary lens at history. And I think we found that Andrew Jackson - and this was five years ago - really spoke to the moment that we were living in and planted the seeds of so much of what we see now. And I think in recent politics, we've seen even more of that.”

However, the connection between the musical and politics is one of long-standing tradition, as has the connection between music and politics. Politicians have used songs to brand themselves, as Obama did with U2’s “City of Blinding Lights,” as Jackson himself did in “The Hunters of Kentucky” (the song that closes the show), and as Reagan famously tried to do with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” a heritage the show’s poster directly alludes to:

Image Credit: SpotCo

The tag line “History just got all sexypants” points out the musical’s willingness to appeal to audiences through tight pants and guyliner, but the reference to Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. cover also connects the show to the song’s dubious political legacy. Though Springsteen meant his song as a critique of Reagan, others read it against the grain as a populist song celebrating America. Writers Friedman and Timbers don’t shy away from critiquing this populist legacy. When discussing the musical’s end, Friedman stated that

“I think it ends trying to force the audience of having - giving them, I think, a lot of laughs along the way, something to really think about, which is, for me, how much responsibility we take for the people we elect, and how much responsibility we take for what the people we elect end up doing.”

This comes out in the way the show doesn’t shy away from depicting Jackson’s negative aspects. Both Jackson and his wife Rachel take slavery for granted, as she sings in “The Great Compromise” that “I always thought I’d live in a house / With a dog and some kids and some slaves.” The show also rewrites the song “Ten Little Indians” to highlight Jackson’s violence against the Native American population: “Ten little Indians / Standing in a line / One got executed / And then there were nine.” And as the song “Crisis Averted” shows citizens reacting to Jackson’s removal of the Seminoles from Florida, it also invites us to critique the public’s willingness to overlook the bad done by politicians on behalf of the citizens:

Florida Woman: I mean, I think it’s a real tragedy that Jackson moved all the Indians from here to Florida.

Florida Man: Me too. A real tragedy.

Florida Woman: And that’s why we hesitated to move here. Absolutely. I mean, we didn’t want it to seem like we were endorsing that kind of behavior.

Florida Man: No. Of course not. But, then we were like… it is nice that it doesn’t snow.

Florida Woman: Um, yes. It is. So, it’s like, it’s great that he did that. But we definitely don’t condone it.

The audience knows that the Trail of Tears was cruel, but like the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo, Americans have been brought to condone it through silent consent.

Image Credit: Gothamist

What I find to be most interesting about the musical is the ways in which its re-mythologizing of Andrew Jackson as emo rock star brings to the forefront the question of history and writing history. The musical includes a designated Storyteller who undertakes to narrate Jackson’s life story, but Jackson shoots the Storyteller in the face before the show’s fourth song, “I’m So That Guy,” in order to take charge of the action and to “make his own story.” In “Rock Star” Jackson narrates his own version of history where “Adams tried to be an American idol / Jefferson tried to be a rock star / Madison tried to make the presidency vital / And James Monroe was a douchebag!” He then claims the mantle of being “a celebrity of the first rank.” After his wife’s complaint in “The Great Compromise” that she is being left behind by his campaigning, he sings after her death in “Public Life” that he will “give my life to the people now” in her honor. He turns tragedy into mythology, the public man sacrificing himself for a dedicated public.

History and the musical have been connected for a while, as my friend Michelle Dvoskin wrote about in her dissertation “‘Listen to the Stories, Hear It in the Songs’: Musical Theatre as Queer Historiography.” As she put it:

“This project argues that not only can musicals ‘do’ history, they offer an excellent genre for theorizing what I call ‘queer historiography.’ While sexuality remains one category of analysis, I use ‘queer’ to signify opposition, not simply to heterosexuality, but to heteronormativity, and normativity more broadly. Musicals' queer historiography, then, is a way of engaging past events that challenges normativity in form as well as content; a way of productively challenging not only what we think we know about the past, but how we come to know it.”

I would argue here that Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson engages in similar acts of queer historiography as its rock style rejects normativity as plainly as its overall treatment of Jackson asks its audience to question the ways in which we think about executive power, political celebrity, and populist sentiment. It draws us to think about the past not just as distant history, but as lived experience and recurrent theme. We may know one Andrew Jackson through high-school textbooks, but the musical forces its audience to rethink that idea—by presenting us with “populajism” and some tight tight sexypants.

Campaign rhetoric of yore

kathrynjeanhamilton — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:09:20 +0000

During this campaign season it's enlightening to recall a little history.

This was one of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt's 1900 presidential campaign posters for a race they won handily. (McKinley was assassinated in 1901, so it was T.R. who followed through.) Note the parallels to today's political situation. The McKinley ticket is running on its record, which includes industrializing the nation, establishing financial stability, and freeing Cuba from Spanish rule. (You'll note that no reference is made to the Philippines, a less swift, clean, in-and-out kind of imperial project.) The before and after images create a straightforward visual argument about the progress that has been made under Republican rule, and McKinley and Roosevelt's brave-looking visages straddle the center of the poster. Ethos is established via their record, here visually depicted as an undeniable march toward better days. The argument? Vote for us, and we'll keep going forward together.

The issues in the 2008 campaign aren't much different: we're talking job creation, economic prosperity, financial soundness, and the success of our overseas ventures (undertaken, as the poster insists, "for humanity's sake"). But today the Republicans can't fall back on their record to convince voters that they're the safe bet.