"Pictures Have Now Become a Necessity": The Use of Images in American History Textbooks

When the second edition of Out of Many arrived, my initial desire, checked only by a squeamishness about defacing books, was to slice off volume i's cover and stick it on my office wall. It was that striking. In full color, bled to the edge, and wrapped around to the back is Richard Caton Woodville's The Sailors Wedding (1852). A genre painting intended to highlight a supposed scene of everyday life, the image, read left to right, shows a patriarchal figure being introduced to a small wedding party while black family servants, among others, stand in the doorway and watch. Woodville's canvas marks only the beginning of an extensive pictorial feast that includes paintings reproduced in both full color and black-and-white, lithographs, cartoons, maps, and photographs. Hardly a page passes without a visual supplement to the written text. The publisher even preens that it is the first to "produce a four-color book directly from computer disk to printer plate."' So it goes with every textbook in American history. Publishers spend tens of thousands of dollars to include hundreds of images. They compete for uncommon pictures that might distinguish their products, since the survey market is highly competitive, and a successful book can mean millions of dollars in sales. Marketing experts understand that students today are visually aware in ways different from previous generations. This is the age of video games and 3-D graphics, of pixels and digital imaging. No wonder that between the first and second editions of Out of Many the publisher shifted the cover illustration from a textile design by a modern artist to a painting that directly evokes a sense of history. And yet, for all the money, research, and creativity employed in selecting pictures, textbooks do not provide students with even a superficial understanding of the place and meaning of images in American history. Authors do not situate the images in their historical context or locate those images within the history of visual