ABSTRACT
This chapter puts 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 chapter’s source of case studies because of the intriguing span its history of representations occupies on the timeline of visual media technologies’ evolution. What can representations of history in different media teach us about how historians, both academic and lay, imagine(d) history and delimit(ed) or set the bounds of its aims?
