ABSTRACT
My interest in iconography was stimulated by the use of visual material among medieval historians who are often confronted with a lack of written sources. A good point of departure and an excellent example of utilizing visual material within a sparsely-documented medieval context is Walter Horn and Ernest Born, The Plan of St. Gall; a Study of the Architecture and Economy of, and Life in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery, 3 Vols. (Berkeley, 1979). Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle; Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880 (Cambridge, England, 1981) provides an exemplary intermeshing of visual sources with political and social history in a modern urban context. Amos Rapaport, The Meaning of the Built Environment; a Nonverbal Communication Approach (Beverly Hills, 1982) and two studies by Kevin Lynch, Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass., 1960) and, What Time is This Place? (Cambridge, Mass., 1972) are comparative studies of perceptual objects within an urban setting. A number of recent analyses of photography have broadened my understanding of the visual artifact: David Nye, Image Worlds; Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890–1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities; The Photography of American Urbanization; 1839–1915 (Philadelphia, 1984), and Allen Trachtenberg, “Image and Ideology; New York in the Photographer’s Eye,” Journal of Urban History, 10 (August, 1984), provided important guidelines for reading photographs as a historical record.
