Seeing the world: Media and vision in US geography classrooms, 1890-1930

This article explains why and how, between the 1890s and the 1920s, American educators and educational publishers tried to use photographic media to (1) help students form concepts of an increasingly complex modern world, and (2) discipline students' eyes and minds to guarantee uniform modes of visuality. Educators hoped these related projects would prepare the nation's future citizens to participate constructively in modern democratic society and a global industrial economy. These efforts, I argue, inadvertently resulted in a remarkably powerful, if unofficial, visual idiom of the nation-state, replicated in and across classroom visual aids. But educators' attempts to teach students constructive visual skills were far less successful, I suggest; determining just what constituted 'good seeing' and training students in those practices remained an elusive educational ideal rather than a classroom reality. Consequently, educators quickly abandoned the effort to inculcate disciplined modes of seeing. The geographic iconography that emerged in this era persisted, however, lasting decades after the ideals that had prompted its construction had disappeared.