ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at broadcast history and how it is represented in other visual media. It discusses the considerable interest films and television exerts on the popular historical imagination and describes the roles played by paintings, prints and photographs. The chapter deals with the importance of visual sources by surveying how video games have created fantastic virtual environments and alternative histories which have informed new audiences about the past by lighting up the historical imagination. In an influential study, Robert Rosenstone has persuasively put the case that we have to take visual histories seriously as sources of evidence. Cave paintings are the earliest and perhaps most obvious example, but there has been since then a continuous use of visual imagery across cultures. The photographs they gathered were generally considered reliable records which if necessary could be submitted as evidence in courts of law, the press, or respectable criminological, sociological and medical journals.
