"Features of cruelty which could not well be described by the pen": the media of atrocity in Harper's Weekly, c. 1862-1866
Date
2023
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation explores the visual culture of violence and its reproduction within Harper’s Weekly’s reporting of the American Civil War by analyzing the relationship among wood engraved illustrations, their photographic sources, and text. During the Civil War, Harper’s Weekly increasingly relied on photographic sources for its illustrated reporting, and this included images of abused enslaved persons, disabled soldiers, and other injured bodies. At Harper’s Weekly these photographs were manually transformed from their original medium into wood engravings, a necessary step in the publication process until the 1880s. As these images moved across media, they not only attained their widest circulation, but also were combined with text and other images to serve particular rhetorical ends. In this dissertation I contend that Harper’s Weekly strategically employed photographs of atrocity at critical moments during the Civil War and Reconstruction to persuade readers of Confederate inhumanity and thereby define the bounds of civil discourse and democratic participation. In doing so, Harper’s Weekly drew upon photography’s evolving documentary status as well as the aesthetics of sentimentalism. ☐ Importantly, this project considers the circulation of photographs of atrocity prior to their appearance in Harper’s Weekly and approaches the publication of these images as wood engravings in Harper’s Weekly’s illustrated newspaper as part of a broader network of photographic circulation, and the circulation of images of atrocity, during the Civil War. This project follows recent interventions in photographic history that have emphasized reproduction and circulation, and that have decentered the photographic print as the primary site for the production of meaning. This project also demonstrates how Harper’s Weekly relied upon an existing public archive—of text and images, and particularly cartes de visite—to report the news and to further its rhetorical position.
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Keywords
American Civil War, Atrocity, Illustration, Photography, Wood engraving