Why we fight: The visual rhetoric of American wars, 1860---1918

This dissertation is concerned with visual media as it became a vehicle for public debate in United States Society. It examines the illustrations from print media published during the three American wars between 1860 and 1918. When observed with care, these images open a window onto the American cultural and political landscape as it evolved. This project is designed to use that window to understand American attitudes toward each other during the Civil War and afterwards as the country began to determine its role on the world scene. It asks how and to what extent outsider groups have negotiated their place in the national dialogue.;The degree to which these populations had access to state of the art media outlets defined the extent of their participation in the country's visual rhetoric. The earliest illustrated printing technology was simply too expensive for poorly financed marginalized groups to afford, but over time this changed. This dissertation covers the period when print was the undisputed monarch of American visual media: between the advent of illustrated journalism and the arrival of moving pictures. During this time, increasingly affordable technology and rising affluence among minority groups made the perspectives expressed in the visual press slightly more reflective of the nation as a whole.;This project draws from a range of scholarship: media history, the histories of war on the home front, and the histories of minority activist groups. It is also loosely related to propaganda analysis. The chapters examine each of the three conflicts' mainstream and alternative illustrated media. Each of the chapters is devoted to one war: The Civil War, The Spanish-American War, and World War I. Historical events and non-visual rhetoric provide the context for the images themselves, with the focus on the visual dialogue as it evolved. This dissertation is a comparative analysis of themes in American visual media over time, with particular attention to the ways outsider groups negotiated their way into the national dialogue. Not surprisingly, both change and continuity are evident. Exploring what changed and what stayed the same illuminates aspects of American society not evident in scholarship of particular moments. In particular, it demonstrates the painfully slow movement toward a more democratic United States media culture and the limitations of that progress.