Reflections on Final Project

    I struggled for a long time trying to come up with a workable theme for my project. From the start, I wanted to tell a story, from beginning to logical conclusion but I felt that would be hard to do just in images, especially if I wanted to have a coherent narrative. But then something happened that was totally unexpected. I was flipping through the TV channels when I stumbled on a news report about some sort of commotion down in South Carolina concerning the flying of the Confederate battle flag. Why I wondered, was everybody getting so wound up over a flag that is not even the official flag of anything?

The Caning of Sumner
Retrieved from the Library Of Congress

     I knew, (I suppose like most people do), the rudimentary details of the South’s secession from the Union in the early 1860s but other than the occasional tour of an old fort -- something that always bored me to tears-- the topic was never of particular interest to me. So I did a quick Wikipedia search and one page led me to another until I was so totally engrossed in the subject I was left wondering why the whole thing is not a bigger deal than it already is. It is a pretty big deal, by the way, but only if you know where to look.

     Like all things momentous, there were significant and not so significant events during the war. And that is what I was trying to capture when I decided to do a pictorial project on the Civil War. Obviously, it would be impossible to tell the whole story with 15 images or less as the project required. However, I quickly found out that the war could be neatly divided into three almost equal parts and I also quickly discovered that is how it has always been done.  That was my starting point and so I started collecting images, rearranging them to fit a narrative until I finally thought I had what I wanted.

     I am trying to tell a story that’s been told thousands of times. It should be remembered that the American Civil War was one of the earliest industrial wars ever fought and it was fought at a time when record keeping was fairly advanced and fairly well understood, so the amount of material out there is enormous. I was not trying to come up with any new startling revelations. My aim was to tell the story as simply as I could, to an audience which has as minimum knowledge of the events of those years,  as I do. But most important, I wanted to be able to look at the presentation and want to know more. That’s why I picked the slides that I did, arranged them in sequence, and gave them a short story or a quote or two.  

The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Retrieved from the Library of Congress

     Whether I succeeded in this endeavor or failed is not for me to say. All I know is that doing research on this project was great fun, illuminating and totally worth it. All the things that I learnt in the process I will probably never be able to use inside or outside a classroom but somehow it doesn’t matter at all. All I know is, those old forts don’t seem so boring after all.