| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Seeing High & Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture. Ed. by Patricia Johnston. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. viii, 308 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-520-24187-8. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 0-520-21488-6.)

Intended primarily for art historians, Seeing High & Low offers a thoughtful bounty of insight for historians of the United States trained in or ignorant of the rhetoric of the image. We who are not art historians ordinarily pay little attention to nonverbal source material. This disregard signifies ignorance on our part, for visual source materials also hold valuable meaning. If we cannot analyze visual culture, our myopia consigns us to only partial access to what counts in the past—particularly past controversies. To rectify our weakness we must take lessons from our colleagues in art history. A great place to start those lessons, this book also rewards readers already initiated into the study of images. The essays in this anthology span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The artists under thoughtful review include Charles Willson Peale, Edmonia Lewis, Eastman Johnson, and Norman Rockwell. By and large the authors succeed in keeping race, class, and region in mind as well as socioeconomic class and various levels of privilege and prestige.

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