Quick Note: This is not related to the post "Using Pictures to Your Advantage". That one is about taking pictures of study guides to help you study better. This is about historical photos.
Mankind's greatest invention has to be that of the photograph. Unlike artwork, it is the split-second image of an event or person forever preserved on paper. In history class, photos are the biggest thing when trying to make a point on a subject. Be it a daguerreotype, Polaroid, or digital image, the pictures of some of our biggest historical happenings can be used to make or break an argument, decide innocence or guilt, or just show how someone or something used to look.
Considering that photographs really didn't come into widespread use until the 1840s, we only seem to have pictures of events from that era onward. But let's say you were trying to argue that Japanese people were mistreated in WWII. You could find pictures, either at the library or online (another great invention), and easily prove how they were mistreated. However, photos all need one thing to make sense: context. Why did someone take a picture of a burning blimp? Why is the person in this picture yelling at a crowd of people, and why does he look so familiar? Whose that man with the long hair and oval rimmed glasses, and why is there a creepy guy behind him? Without context, you wouldn't know that the pictures I just described are of the Hindenburg, V.I Lenin, and John Lennon with his murderer, respectively. That's why it's so important to know the subject of the picture, the people or objects in the picture, and why it was so important that someone decided to preserve it forever in time. Otherwise someone could easily poke holes in your argument (those aren't Japanese people during WWII, those are Vietnamese refugees from the Vietnam War). In any case, pictures can be a valuable tool or a hole-digging curse. It just depends on how you use it.
So if your hankering for some old photos to use, make sure it's accurate! God forbid you make an embarrassment of yourself because you didn't know the difference between Vlad Lenin and John Lennon!
-Pharaoh Noh-Tyep
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