Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images As Historical Evidence (Picturing History Series)

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Summary: Ideas about images as evidence
Review: Burke discusses using images as historical resources and evidence, focusing on both the positive insights that might be garnered from imagery as well as the potential problems. One such historiographical danger is that the historian might view images from within their present context and not with the same significance or contextual milieu that the original historical actors might have attributed to them. This point, and others throughout the text, are elementary to many historians; others could use a friendly reminder of presentist tendencies. While there is nothing revolutionary to modern historians in Burke's text, it is a pleasant reminder of some of the pitfalls in constructing historical narrative based on visual evidence.