Event Courses and Workshops Imperial Projections: “Witnessing” the War of 1898 in American Visual Culture

Date and Location

  • When: Monday, August 15, 2022

    5:00 pm - 6:00 pm EDT

  • This event will be livestreamed on zoomgov.com External. It will be available for viewing afterwards in the Library's Event Videos collection.

  • Where: Online Only

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Swann Fellow, Ramey Mize, will describe her research into the ways that technologies of violence, vision, and image-making intersected with the Battles of Santiago and San Juan Hill in the War of 1898.

Firsthand sketches by William Glackens reflect a dissonance between the eyewitness claims of artists and the calculated erasure of Cuba’s Liberation Army. Sent to the Cuban front by McClure’s Magazine, Glackens chronicled the movement and exploits of U.S. troops from Tampa to Santiago. Almost none of his published drawings depicted Cuba’s Liberation Army.

This omission served U.S. imperial interests and is a hallmark of related works by artists like Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington as well as U.S. visual culture more broadly. Drawn largely from the Library of Congress’s collection, these works offer insights into the persistent obfuscation of Cuba as wartime events were reenacted and recast across mediums. This event will be recorded.