Photogrammar

The Journal of American History, in collaboration with the Web site History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu, publishes regular reviews of digital history projects. The reviews appear both in the printed journal and at History Matters. History Matters provides an annotated guide to more than one thousand projects for teaching U.S. history. The goal is to offer a gateway to the works in digital history and to summarize their strengths and weaknesses with particular attention to their utility for teachers. The digital history reviews are edited by Jeffrey McClurken. Please contact him at [email protected] if you would like to suggest a digital history project for review or write a review. We also welcome comments on our review guidelines, which are available at http://jah.oah.org/submit/digital-history-reviews/. The Farm Security Administration/Office for War Information (Fsa/Owi) is responsible for one of the most recognized archives of U.S. photographs. Commissioned by the federal government during the depression and World War II, this “encyclopedia of American life” was supervised by the Historical Section's head, Roy Stryker. The collection comprises approximately 170,000 photographs, taken by fourteen staff photographers, including some of the world's most recognized, such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn, along with dozens of freelancers. These photographers' intense witness forms part of our collective memory of midcentury America; public subsidization also explains the Fsa/Owi photographs' broad currency, as there are few fees associated with the use of these images. In the agency's time, the Fsa/Owi file photographs were used by newspapers and magazines, in exhibitions at county fairs and colleges, in government reports, in the new photo magazines such as LIFE and Look and novel photo-texts, which formed part of the growing visual culture of the United States at midcentury. Today scholars, filmmakers, and publishers continue to make great use of them

Government (linguistics · Great Depression · Library science · Media studies · Political science · Section (typography · Sociology · Witness · Computer Science · History · Law · Photography and Visual Culture