Welcome to Clio
This website seeks to illustrate the unique role of visual images in American history. Our palette is broad: for us visual images are created with an array of tools, from the photographer’s camera, to the quilter’s needles, to the engraver’s etchings.
We see visualizing history as a process of creating images that record or interpret past events or accounts of past events. Visualizing history is also an undertaking that forges ties between historians, filmmakers, web designers, and new media producers in their efforts to produce original, credible, and engaging history. Our aim is to promote visual literacy by exploring the variety of ways that images enhance our understanding of the past and challenge us to hone our interpretive skills.
CLIO is dedicated to developing innovative American history projects that are designed to engage students, to assist educators and researchers, and to appeal to a wide public audience through documentary films, the World Wide Web, and other new media.
Featured Section: Visualizing America
Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagination, 1840-1900
Visual images are viewed today as indispensable aids to the study of history, but this has not always been the case. By focusing on the production history of two major illustrated histories from the mid-nineteenth century, this interactive exhibit suggests how visual images gradually became first acceptable, then desirable, and finally indispensable to historical thinking.
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“Send out an old quilt”: Quilts as Homespun War Memorials
Close examination of commemorative textiles reveals history and memory intertwined in material culture, with highly selective stories, political sentiments, and visual marks of hardship and trauma. The fabrics, patterns, colors, and stitches in quilts connect relationships, events, and causes, privileging certain war experiences and leaving out others. Although quilts cannot tell the whole story of war, they express significant war-time sentiment and capture unwritten memories.
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Photography Exhibits
Photography is the great divide in the development of visual history. Images captured through a lens shape and alter perceptions of historical memory; they can provide both authentic insights and misleading notions of the past. Clio features one-of-a-kind online exhibits about early American women photographers Frances Benjamin Johnston, Mary and Frances Allen and The Peter Palmquist Gallery, presenting the work of Abigail E. Cordozo, Emma Olive O’Connor, Nellie Tichnor McGraw, and Elizabeth W. Withington. Enter exhibits >