Reading Between the Lines, Part 3

Here I will give another example from my book, Photo by Brady: A Picture of the Civil War. In doing research with photographs and other primary sources, one must always consider the source.  This famous photograph (in the National Archives) is entitled "Brady Under Fire."  On your screen it may be hard to make him out, but the celebrity photographer, Mathew B. Brady, is indeed in this picture, standing by the wheel of an artillery piece, wearing his distinctive straw boater.   "Wow," the viewer exclaims.  "That Brady risked life and limb to get his pictures of the war."

Excuse me.  Just a moment, please.  Consider the source!  This photograph was produced and published by the Brady studio.  Brady was careful to include himself in many of his famous war images -- it helped solidify his reputation as the war photographer.  He created the title for the image.  It could just have easily been titled "Look at Me!  I'm the Dauntless Photographer Staring Into the Eyes of the Enemy!"  Okay, fair enough, you might think, if he did make this image under fire why not say so?  For decades this image was taken on faith as just what it was called.

However, photographic historians have debunked the photo and they did so without breaking a sweat.  The technological constraints of photography in this period were such that figures were required to stay motionless for several seconds -- as much as thirty seconds depending on light conditions.  Although you probably can't make it out on your screen, the U.S. flag in the background is blurred, showing that it was flapping in the wind during the exposure of the picture.  And yet all the men are clear and unblurred, meaning that they held still for the picture.

 Now think about it: can you imagine a crowd of some two dozen men standing perfectly still for the period of time required to compose the image and make the exposure -- during an artillery bombardment?   Oh, Mr. Brady, you humbug!  This picture is a publicity stunt worthy of your friend, P.T. Barnum.

Reading between the lines becomes easier with practice, and it also becomes easier with more specialized knowledge.  Without knowing how photographs were made in the Civil War you might not be able to deconstruct this picture.  But if you have the facts and you consider the source -- aha!  You discover you have a document that is interesting in a very different way than what you thought you had at first.  Facts and logic are two indispensable tools for writing nonfiction.  Consider the source!

Reading Between the Lines, Part 2

Using primary sources in the research process can be both rewarding and frustrating. Reading a letter or a diary can be exciting, but so often I find myself thinking "Why didn't he explain X?" -- or Y or Z?  So much is left out that the original audience was expected to know without being told!  My job is to figure out what went without saying, and to decide what the missing pieces might be.  This requires a certain amount of confidence, and the willingness to make logical inferences.
Let me give you an example. While doing research for a book about the Civil War (Photo by Brady: A Picture of the Civil War), I ran across a fascinating battlefield tidbit (of course, I ran across dozens, but I'm just going to use one right now.) The tidbit was the information that at the end of a battle, sodiers' faces would be black around the mouth from gunpowder, because they had to bite off the ends of their paper cartridges, and in the frenzy of battle the biting and tearing got a little messy with gunpowder splashing and spilling.  

Okay, what can we extrapolate from that?  I like to consider all the senses when I have to flesh out details.  "Faces black with gunpowder" is a vivid visual detail, but it also suggests other sensations: the gritty feel of gunpowder between the teeth, not to mention the taste of it in the back of the throat for hours at a time.  (Full disclosure: I have not tasted gunpowder so I don't know how to describe it.)  It suggests the sting of gunpowder in the eyes or up the nose; I can imagine spitting black spit and blowing black mucous into a hanky.  Does everything smell of gunpowder when it coats the inside of your nose?  Do you spend the first hour after battle spitting and rinsing out your mouth, provided you can get water?  The gunpowder must also be in the ears, the hair, down the shirt collar -- everywhere.  If you've been sweating no doubt you are smeared with black sweat, and the creases of your skin will be etched with black powder. Chances are that a right-handed soldier will have more powder on the right side of his face and head, and vice versa for a lefty. 

Thus with one sensory detail, I can extrapolate a whole panoply of contingent information.  It takes some  practice, but anyone can do it.  I find many kids are unaccustomed to making logical inferences, so when I demonstrate this process to young readers it looks a little like a magic trick, or like I'm just "making stuff up."  But trust me, it's not really pulling a rabbit out of a hat -- you just have to look carefully inside the hat and see what's in there.

Reading Between the Lines, Part 1

A large part of what I do while researching historical documents or images is read between the lines, or draw logical inferences. Making historical information feel immediate and alive to readers means feeling my way into the material. This photograph from the Library of Congress website collection of Civil War photographs provides a good illustration. (Some details may be hard to see on your screen, so just bear with me. ) At first glance this photograph seems rather mute. Most kids seldom look at black and white images, and this picture might say nothing to a contemporary student. But with a little practice we can infer a great deal about the circumstances of this photograph, and paint a more colorful picture.
We can infer, to begin with, that the time of year is not winter -- we see leaves on the trees. Okay. Can we pin it down further? Yes, I think so. You notice how dusty the road looks -- the wheel tracks are deep but dry. I don't think it has rained for several weeks. This suggests late summer, right? And the shadows are crisp and sharp, so it's a bright sunny day, and probably hot. All at once I can bring all of my experience of "hot bright late summer day" to this photograph, and I can hear the cicadas buzzing in the trees, and see the swallows swooping for mosquitoes over the creek, and smell the damp stones in the arches of the bridge. I don't need direct, documentary evidence of the cicadas or the mosquitoes or the swallows; indirect evidence abounds. In doing historical research the writer (of fiction as well as nonfiction) can safely extrapolate a great deal from available evidence.