Today, for my undergraduate course on the history of the American Civil War Era, I started by displaying this image and then posing this question to students: “What do you see in the old photograph on the screen? What historical questions does it raise for you?”
As I had hoped, the students came up with lots of great questions and observations. How old did a boy have to be to fight in the Civil War? (Which gave me a chance to talk about Sgt. Johnny Clem and the recent work of Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant.) Did Americans at the time already romanticize the war? What do the clothes the children are wearing say about their family’s wealth and class? And what on earth is the girl in the picture holding?
But what none of the students guessed was …
That boy is me! And the girl is my sister. The photo is not that old, but it is from the 1900s. I believe the original was taken in a touristy photo booth at Six Flags over Fiesta Texas in San Antonio, where I grew up. And while it doesn’t answer the great questions my students raised, it does definitively prove that I am a goofy nerd who has been interested in history and the Civil War for a very long time.
I got the idea for this exercise from Peter Felten’s keynote at a recent teaching symposium at Rice. Felten talked about showing a photograph of his grandfather’s family of tenant farmers and then revealing its source. The idea was both to humanize himself as the instructor and to begin thinking historically from day one.
I hope it does those things for my course as well. But if it also makes students scrutinize future images that look old very carefully, and withhold interpretive judgment without more contextual information, I will be glad for that outcome, too.
