ABSTRACT
I have, spread out before me, a stack of Xeroxed photographs, and notes (neatly arranged by topic and date, in file folders), and also several-many-books. The books come in three main types. First, there are the historical accounts-books written by historians, on the subject of particular, already long gone, moments: the age of imperialism, the American Civil War, the 1920s. Second, there are the photograph collections: one book, for instance, collects photographs taken by Charles Moore, during the Civil Rights movement; another depicts an array of women, from many different regions of the world, all wearing the veil; still another attempts to present, in chronological order, exemplary photographs from each decade of the twentieth century. Finally, there are books about education: essays on pedagogy and teaching strategies, first-person reflective-practitioner accounts, explorations of diverse teaching methodologies. Collectively, these texts are meant to help me arrange my thoughts about the sorts of interpretive methods that historians employ, and the ways in which they can and should be put to use, in visual ways, in middle and secondary history classrooms. They are meant to provide the raw material for my attempts to explore questions about visual knowledge and historical inquiry. But they appear to be having something of the opposite effect. The primary documents-rich with their depictions of individual and collective humanity at work and at rest-distract me, inviting me to drift off into memory and wonder; the scholarship, offering up various methodologies and diverse suggestions, overwhelms and disperses my focus.
