Visualizing Imperialism & the Philippines, 1898-1913
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.
Course Information
About this Course
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:
- Historical debates that emerged in political cartoons
- Issues of race and prejudice in both cartooning and photography
- Photography as a tool of power in conquest and colonization
- The often forgotten Philippine-American war
- Ethnographic photography
- How the theme of civilization and barbarism appeared to justify imperial wars
- Early use of cross-cultural photography in mass media.
The roundtable discussion format of the course will set up a discursive and exploratory style of learning. As the teaching team brings together scholars who have studied the topics from different disciplines, you will explore multiple points of view and learn how to work with visual evidence as primary sources to assemble arguments.
For teachers, the course presents a number of units developed for the MIT Visualizing Cultures (VC) project. The instructors are the authors who created the VC resource, and the course provides a pathway into the VC website content. The VC website is widely taught in both secondary and college courses, and is the primary resource for this course. Educators can selectively pick modules that target needs in their classrooms; the course can be used in a “flipped” classroom where students are assigned modules as homework.
What you'll learn
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:
- The study of history and how it uses visual sources
- How political and cultural debates that occurred in the past can shed light on similar issues today
- How to work with visual images
- How to engage challenging – at times disturbing – historical sources
- The study of databases and visual communication.
Prerequisites
None
Meet your instructors
John W. Dower
Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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.
