Picture This!

About the session

"Picture This!" was an Organization of American Historians annual-meeting session devoted to the use of visual evidence in undergraduate U.S. history teaching — political cartoons, photographs, propaganda posters, material-culture objects, and the questions they raise both as evidence about the past and as teaching artefacts in the classroom.

The session paired panel discussion with audience polling: attendees were shown specific images and asked to assess their interpretive payoff for an undergraduate teaching context. The companion polling site collected pre- and post-session responses and produced the comparison data discussed in the session writeup.

Coverage

The session was discussed in two follow-up posts at the History News Network — both linking to this companion site as the "polling site" or "Picture This! polling site." Those posts laid out the session findings on the gap between expert and audience readings of specific political images, and connected the conversation to the longer-running discussion in the OAH about visual literacy in undergraduate teaching.

What the session found

Three findings travelled out of the session into the subsequent visual-literacy literature:

• Audience confidence in the historical context of an image tracked closely with whether the audience had been told the date of the image. Without a date, even specialist-trained audiences guessed wrong on the period substantially more often than they thought they did.
• Caption framing dominated interpretation. The same image with two different (both accurate) captions produced sharply different audience readings — a finding with obvious implications for teaching and for textbook production.
• Material-culture objects (a button, a flag, a printed ticket) generated more confident historical reading than photographs of comparable subject — suggesting that the object's tactile dimension carries interpretive weight even in a screened presentation.

For teaching use

The polling-site material has been used by U.S. history instructors for in-class visual-literacy exercises since the original OAH session. The structure — show the image first, ask for an interpretation, then introduce the date, context, and provenance — translates well to either the live classroom or an asynchronous discussion-board assignment.