| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagination, 1840–1900. By Greg-ory M. Pfitzer. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. xx, 276 pp. $45.00, ISBN 1-58834-084-8.)

A century before American Heritage or the History Channel, Americans learned their past from "illustrated histories." In an engaging, well-illustrated narrative, Gregory M. Pfitzer examines the intellectual, cultural, technological, and economic factors that contributed to this genre's ascendancy and decline. Influenced by recent scholarship on visual culture and book history, Pfitzer analyzes these books as collaborations among publishers, authors, and artists, as commercial products, and as touchstones for larger questions about truth and perspective. Debates about the genre were also contests about historical understanding: whether pictures could accurately and adequately convey the past, whether history's chief ends were moralistic or documentary, and whether artistic subjectivity or an emerging doctrine of objectivity would dominate the presentation of the past.

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