An award-winning cultural and political historian.
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An award-winning cultural and political historian, Louis Masur is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University. His most recent work is The Sum of Our Dreams: A Concise History of America. He is the author of many other books, including works on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, a seminal photograph, the first World Series, and Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. Masur’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and Slate. He has received teaching awards from Harvard University, the City College of New York, Trinity College, and Rutgers University.
From its introduction in 1839, photography has transformed the ways in which we see the world. Photographs capture events and also transform them; they depict reality but also tell a story. Scores of photographs have changed America and we will discuss several of them in detail. Some, such as Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother and Joe Rosenthal’s Flag Raising on Mt. Suribachi, will not come as a surprise. Others, including a nineteenth-century photograph of an immigrant, may open eyes anew. Examining the histories of these images, and learning how to read them, provides a deeper understanding of how photographs have shaped—and continue to shape--American society and culture.