Welcome to Clio
Visualizing History is as old as petroglyphs and as new as digital imaging. It is the act of documenting or interpreting events with images, or producing an historical narrative—of communicating across time and space. For centuries chroniclers and artists have used their talents to record their history with words and images. Today we can use new media tools to mine the rich resources of the past by combining moving images and sound to create a vivid sense of the look, feel, and experience of another time. More about Clio Visualizing History >
Featured Section: Visualizing America
“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 >
Clio Films
Clio’s documentary film Miss America is part one of American Originals: 100 Years of Women and Popular Culture. American Originals was created through the collaborative effort of historians who came together to discuss history as presented on television and in documentary films, and specifically the dearth of films about women’s roles in American culture. Miss America tracks the country’s oldest beauty contest and it paints a vivid picture of an institution that reveals much about a changing nation. Enter Clio Films >
Project Purpose
Clio Visualizing History seeks to illustrate the unique role visual images play in a rich and engaging sense of American history. Our photography exhibits reflect our interest in the still image as a key component in visual history; our documentary films relate to our belief in the power of moving images, and our digital archive uses the latest technology to capture both, as well as documents and other memorabilia from recent historical events and movements. Our aim is to present material that is useful to a wide audience of students, teachers, filmmakers, and both novice and professional historians.