Visualizing the American Revolution: How 1776 Came to Life in 1926

Professor Jennifer Tucker talks about how the "visual pageant" of a century ago paved the way for modern storytelling of the American past.
About this Event

How was 1776 narrated as a visual story 100 years ago, in 1926? Decades before Ken Burns’s “The American Revolution” or the Broadway heights of Hamilton, the memory of American Revolution was already a multimedia event. In 1926, America’s sesquicentennial, a revolution in visual culture, sparked by new developments in the making and use of photography, cinema, and educational lantern slides, transformed the possibilities for telling the history of 1776 pictorially. In this talk, Professor Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University) dives into the pivotal decades of the 1920s, exploring how a generation of teachers, filmmakers, historians, and librarians mined global archives to create the first mass picture archives of transatlantic history. Discover how the "visual pageant" of a century ago paved the way for modern storytelling, demonstrating that the 1920s was a pivotal decade in the rise of visual storytelling in narrating the American past.