Mediating the historical imagination: Visual media and the U.S. Civil War, 1861-2011

This dissertation offers a critical history of popular media representations of the U.S. Civil War, ranging from 1860s painted panoramas to twenty-first-century digital museum displays, along with the countless films, lithographs, stereographs, magic lantern slides, and video games from the intervening years. The project aims to put contemporary media theory and contemporary philosophy of history into conversation and under mutual scrutiny, proposing that an era's representational media technologies consistently inflect that era's reigning conceptualizations of history. The Civil War serves as the dissertation's source of case studies because of the intriguing span its history of representations occupies on the timeline of visual media technologies' evolution. From the time of the Civil War itself to today, writers have turned to visual media to metaphorize the contradictions and conundrums inherent to historical representation. What can representations of history in different media teach us about how historians, both academic and lay, imagine history and delimit or set the bounds of its epistemological and ontological aims? Likewise, how has film and media theory inflected ongoing arguments in contemporary philosophy of history? All told, I am seeking what the contemporary German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst has called a "precise media archaeology of the historical imagination.".