panoramas

The age of the panorama and the transformation of visual culture.

The aesthetics of virtual reality, and its promise of “magical” embodied experience, can be found in older experiments with immersive media.

Immersive displays brought 19th century spectators to far-off places and distant battles. The way they portrayed history, however, was often inaccurate.

One of the war's greatest battles was fought again and again on a spectacular canvas nearly 400 feet long.

Herman Melville likely saw the panorama “Whaling Voyage,” which records the sinking of the whaler Essex, while staying in Boston in 1849.

The history of Atlanta's first Civil War monument may reveal how to deal with them in the present.

How a re-creation of its most famous battle helped erase the meaning of the Civil War.

On the trail of whales, Melville, and Douglass in New Bedford.

Thorstein Veblen’s maverick economic ideas made him the foremost iconoclast of the Age of Iconoclasts.

New information on Henry Box Brown, an enslaved man who would turn escape into an art form.

Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, this single 77 by 55 centimeter sheet tells multiple stories in both text and illustration.

Photographs of empty city streets went out of fashion, but lately are coming back again. What's lost in these images of vacant streets?

157 years after the famous battle, Gettysburg endured another invasion.

Documenting the New York City construction boom at the turn of the 20th century.

A look at early photography reveals the nuances of California's early development.

George R. Lawrence captured one of the most iconic photos of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. That was only one event in his very interesting life.