Political cartoons and photography at the turn of the 20th century reveal debates over US entry into global imperialism through the conquest and occupation of the Philippines. Join historians on a journey through this rich content drawn from MIT Visualizing Cultures.
Political cartoons and photography at the turn of the 20th century reveal debates over US entry into global imperialism through the conquest and occupation of the Philippines. Join historians on a journey through this rich content drawn from MIT Visualizing Cultures.
In this online course from the MIT Department of History, we use visual records as a way of understanding history at the turn of the 20th century. You will learn how to navigate visual primary sources and use them to investigate:
This course invites learners into the process of exploring history through content that looks back at a complex millennial time. Learners will acquire background and skills that will help with:
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John Dower, emeritus professor of Japanese history, retired from the History faculty in 2010 but remains active in MIT Visualizing Cultures: a pioneering website he co-founded with Professor Shigeru Miyagawa in 2002 that breaks new ground in the scholarly use of visual materials to reexamine the experience of Japan and China in the modern world. As of 2024, eleven of the lengthy presentations on this multi-unit site were authored by him.
Books by Professor Dower include Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999); Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (2010); and Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World (2012). Awards for Embracing Defeat include the Pulitzer Prize (for general nonfiction), National Book Award (for nonfiction), and Bancroft Prize (for U.S. hisotry). Professor Dower also was executive producer of a documentary titled Hellfire—A Journey from Hiroshima that was a finalist for an academy award in 1988.
Christopher Capozzola graduated from Harvard College and completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2002. At MIT, he teaches courses in political and legal history, war and the military, and the history of international migration, and in 2018 was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, MIT’s highest honor for undergraduate teaching. He is currently completing a history of Filipinos in the U.S. armed forces and has contributed as an author to the Visualizing Cultures project.
Ellen Sebring, media artist and theorist, was a Research Fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and the founding Creative Director of the MIT Visualizing Cultures project, with new units in projection in 2020, and a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University (2017-2018). Her book, Centerbook: the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Evolution of Art-Science-Technology at MIT , was released fall 2019. Sebring's immersive reality applications enhance visual access to history, focused on the Boxer Uprising in China, 1900.