Text: http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/wlgr/wlgr-greeklegal88.shtml

What would these torches have been made out of? Why wouldn't they use lamps or candles?

We are all familiar with photographs. Also, it seems pretty obvious that photographs can be an interesting historical source. After all, they show us a snippet of the past, capturing visual details someone describing a scene might have picked up on, they show us something about the who, where, and when and so forth. But both as a primary source and as a subject of historical study, they do pose their own unique challenges and sometimes require the ability to ask questions that might not be obvious at first resp. a certain way of thinking about them that sometimes doesn't jive with how we are used to in dealing with photographs and visual media. This all is a bit similar to Kracauer's approach to film, which I have discussed before, and which some might enjoy reading as context, but here is a quick introduction into the use of photographs within history:

We tend to think about photographs as visual representations of past reality. They do capture a moment in time after all. But much like with textual documents, what isn't shown can hold important clues about the photo, its subject and its wider context. And the context itself is often very important to understand what we see in the first place.

To exemplify what I mean: For pretty obvious reasons, we have hardly any photos from Nazi death camps that show the process of the Holocaust. But we do have some. The Sonderkommando photographs are four blurred photographs taken secretly in August 1944 inside the Auschwitz concentration camp by members of the Jewish Sonderkommando, the special work detail in Aushwitz charged with clearing the corpses from the gas chamber after a gassing had taken place. These photos are used frequently in Museums and Memorial Sites all over the world and the most famous one is frequently displayed like this [potential NSFW warning since it shows the burning of corpses].

Most people would see that and say, it's pretty straightforward but that version misses a crucial detail that emphasizes the importance of what is outside of the frame. The original looks like this. At first glance, there seems little difference in that the only added detail is that there is the door/window frame visible in the second photograph. That door/window frame however tells us some very crucial details about the photograph, it's context, and how it was made.

The black frames tell us that the person taking the photograph could not use their camera in a way within the conventions of the time and thus, not openly. Film being not something used for a quick snapshot, you wanted to get what you want to photograph in the right angles. That whoever took the photographs from the dark, through a door/window; that the angles are wrong and the photos are out of focus shows that these photos had to be taken in secret by people who were not allowed to have a camera, by the inmates of the camp rather than by the guards. The un-cropped version shows us the position of the photographers as well as the conditions under which they took the pictures and thus, we get a greater idea of the context of the photo, making it ultimately a better source.

To use the words of Franziska Reiniger's text about the Sonderkommando photos: The black frame that doesn’t show very much is as valuable as the other parts of the picture. Pictures aren't just visual representations of their subject, they must also be understood in the context of the act of taking the specific picture. The black frame represents the room, the dark chamber in which the person had to step back to take the picture. It represents the situation of the shot itself, the place that made its existence possible. To remove the door/window frame at the edges, to make the photo appear more calm and clear, hides from the viewer very essential parts of the information it transports.

The second rather crucial point and the one the academic field of visual history is concerned with is that pictures can transport different meanings, in the sense of different interpretations for us as the viewers, in different contexts and that how and what pictures are taken, how and in what form they are put on display, and how they are subsequently viewed and perceived can tell us important things about culture, society, and more in the past and present. This sounds complicated, and sometimes it really can be, but let me try to illustrate it using a wide-spread and comparatively obvious example.

Some of you might be familiar with this photograph of Winston Chruchill inspecting a Thompson gun in 1940 while inspecting the defense fortifications near Hartlepool in Northern England. During WWII, this photo had a rather illustrious career that exemplifies how context and cultural visual cues are immensely important to what we see when we see a photograph like this.

The British used this photo in the context of the propaganda effort in the aftermath of the June 4, 1940 speech to the house of commons during which Churchill said that the Britains would never surrender and instead fight on the beaches, on the landing grounds, the fields and so on and so forth. Sometimes also used in the cropped version, the idea was to make Churchill look statesman like while at the same time, he too, as a democratically elected head of government, was ready to go to war together with the British people. It evokes the image of the decidedly nonmilitary dressed Churchill taking up his machine pistol to fight invading Germans at the beaches. The contrast of the gun and the suit, of the cigar dangling from his mouth with both a look on his face and a posture we perceive as determined is what makes the essence of this photo in the British context. Again, the cropped version is more effective even since when we don't see the guy standing behind Churchill and the soldier next to him we tend to focus more on Churchill as a symbol, as embodying the idea of fighting the Germans on the beaches and everywhere else.

Some might already know what's coming now, especially if you dealt with WWII propaganda before, but it wasn't just the British who used this photograph. The Germans also used it to great effect. This is the German propaganda version.

The first and most obvious difference is the huge caption reading "Heckenschützen", which is commonly translated as sniper into English but is really a term heavily familiar to a German public in WWII from its use in the Franco-Prussian war of 1871 where it was used for franc-tireurs. Franc-tireurs were military irregulars employed in said war to harangue Germans behind their lines, which proved to be a rather traumatizing experience for the German military establishment and public alike. "Heckenschütze" means literally, a person shooting from the hedges, carrying strong implication of deceit, treachery, of unjust practices of war.

The second thing to be noted is that in order to underscore the "Heckenschützen" association, at the right hand side of the picture, a black area was added and Churchill's head was cropped slightly to be more angled. It's subtle but in conjunction with the black bar, it appears as if Churchill is looking round the corner of a house or structure. Like he is lurking, hidden somewhere, only waiting to shoot at someone who doesn't suspect it. These visual cues are to further underscore the message of the caption: Churchill is like a franc-tireur, a war criminal, waiting to prey on unsuspecting Germans.

And yet, there is even another layer of visual message transported in that image. I could only find a rather bad version of it and might not be as apparent on first glance but while the original is a pretty clear picture, whoever designed the German propaganda version added a lot of grain and harder dark-light contrasts to the image of Churchill. This is meant to imitate the aesthetics and looks of the popular gangster with a Tommy gun trope. The German public has been aware of things like the Chicago Valentine's Day Massacre, Al Capone and the likes both through newspapers, popular Gangster movies, and Nazi propaganda by the time the war started. The Nazis, in fact, included propaganda slogans like "Berlin must not become Chicago" in the 1930s, clearly referencing the image of the American city as a crime infested hellhole. The Liberators propaganda poster also references the Tommy Gun as a symbol for organized crime, further underscoring how a European public would have been familiar with the trope as denoting the Al Capone etc. association.

What in the British contexts were symbols of resilience and a democratic head of state sharing the plight of the people, maybe even of what we today call coolness – the cigar, the hat, the suit – were in the German context symbols for something dark, sinister, and criminal, further underscoring the message the Germans wanted to tell about Churchill being a criminal.

It's virtually the same image, yet it transports diametrically opposed meanings to its intended audience. This is a rather obvious example but again, thinking about the cultural knowledge of what Germans associated with the term "Heckenschütze" as well as the popular gangster images the German propaganda version tries to evoke vs. the "fight on the beaches" context of the British version is a pretty good way of thinking about how to approach photographs such as these as a source for the historical study of the past. They tell us more not just about what they show but also about how they were perceived in their context and thus tell us more about a given society at that point in time.

If you have any questions, comments, and further examples, post them below. I look forward to an interesting discussion.

Edit: Another interesting text for those wishing to read more is this Susan Sontag Essay about Looking at War and the how we perceive war through pictoral depictions

I realize that question is a bit arcane, but I am curious if anyone here may have some insight. There is pretty famous Russian/Cossack song called "Two brothers were going." It describes two brothers returning home from the Turkish front. According to the song on their way back they ended up near the Polish border where a Pole (or allegorically Polish soldiers) opened fire on them.

My question is what conflict could this possibly refer to? I simply can't think of a war where Russian soldiers would have fought the Turks but also had to pass through a hostile Poland.

Here is a picture showing muslim density. Surely the asian countries along the way to Indonesia and Malaysia should have a fairly dense population of muslims, correct? Or was it that Indonesia and Malaysia didn't have a structured culture and religion so they were easily converted to islam when muslim missionaries came over.

I also saw this video and was fairly surprised -- Daley seemed fairly autocratic and evil to me (my paper is pretty scathing) and it just surprises me that anybody still lauds him (without the threat of losing a job, as it was during his administration.)

Sorry for the rambling post, I'm pretty over tired right now!

Now, I'm not going to be tested on any history I might read, but I would still like to get the most out of it. Apparently there's some research showing that taking notes is bad for memory at least insofar as people taking notes might shut down their brains while doing so, but it still seems like there would probably be long-term benefits for me doing so.

My question is, does anyone have any tips in the realm of note taking that might be helpful for a non-history student when reading history? Or perhaps any general non-student, amateur historian study tips, for instance, how should I read a history book to get the most out of it?

A definition the of the Sinosphere, or East-Asian Cultural Sphere, for those not into the whole brevity thing.

Breaking down the surnames in this regions:

• a recent survey found that the list of Chinese surnames is a little over 4,000 (source in Chinese, Wikipedia article here ), in a country of 1.4 billion people.

• Taiwan has about 1,500, many of those shared with China.

• Korea, has around 286 total surnames in use.

• In Vietnam, staggeringly, 14 surnames account for 90% of the population of nearly 100 million, with almost 2/5ths of the population having the surname Nguyen.

In stark contrast to this homogeneity, the current edition of the Expanded Dictionary of Japanese Family Names has more than 290,000 entries, and while many of these are historical and not in use, estimates place the average of Japanese surnames in use today around 100,000. Further, Japanese surnames tend to be polysyllabic, as opposed to the strictly monosyllabic surnames of the other cultures listed above.

So: given the high to extreme lack of diversity in surnames throughout the Sinosphere, were there historical or cultural factors that made Japan the exception to this rule? Conversely, were there shared historical factors on the continent that led to commonality and brevity of surnames that Japan did not experience? Or is this all a linguistic oddity? To that last point: it is worth noting that while most Chinese languages and Vietnamese are tonal, Korean is not, so this alone should not account for the discrepancy in Japanese.