Technology can make history vibrant and beat back ignorance
World War I happened in black and white. World War II happened in black and white with spots of color, usually reserved for magazine covers. Vietnam happened in color, but it was bad color. But by the time we reached the Middle Eastern wars, color and definition were so good that images of air-to-ground missiles could be captured in a fury of fire the snap second they hit their targets.
In a century, history has been transformed.
It probably can’t be proven, but it is not unreasonable to suspect that America’s miserable understanding of history today is because, after the advent of color film and color TV, everything in the past seemed different and uninteresting.
Images from the Civil War, flat and colorless, somehow did not translate into real life. Prior to 1935, when Eastman Kodak came out with Kodachrome, nothing seemed real. The sun didn’t shine. Blue eyes lost definition and became vaguely creepy. Instead of being green and vibrant, shrubs appeared more as dark scratches on the film. And prior to that, there were no photos at all.
History, or the study of history, has suffered from this. In the television age, words on a page and images in black and white can’t compete. So kids lost interest. Schools seemed to as well. How do you teach a still, colorless world when the brilliant wizardry of STEM beckons?
So we are left with people who believe that the Boston Tea Party was about principle, not economics. Who see no downside of mixing church and state. Who are ignorant of the consequences of abandoning compromise. Who do not know why a peaceful transition of power is such a big deal — and so fragile.
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Black-and-white photography is a two-edged sword. It records, but misrepresents that past.
Prior to the electric light, the world was more colorful and what today we would call less tasteful. To brighten their homes, people painted their rooms the color of jelly beans. No one was selecting “Willow Leaf,” or anything that would make darkened rooms even more drab.
U.S. 40 heading west through Washington County would have been a riot of color, with gaudy stage coaches and even more cacophonous billboards vying for the travelers’ attention.
Before there was such a thing as homeowner associations, there was no ill neon paint couldn’t cure.
Or consider the case of the Greek Marbles, the statuary of classic antiquity that we all know to be studies in pearly white. And it wasn’t just tourists who thought that.
For generations, scholars, artists, historians, people who might have known better, believed Venus de Milo & Co. were a saintly white, the color of the gods. Neoclassical art echoed this belief, in our lily white statuary of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.
Like with black-and-white photos, we assume what we see today is historically accurate. We trust our eyes. All this time, evidence to the contrary was right in front of us, some of it even visible to the naked eye — little flecks of color that hadn’t quite worn away over the millennia.
It wasn’t until the end of the 20th century that scholars began to realize the truth. And then an interesting thing began to happen. Schoolchildren slogging dully through museums of classic art suddenly perk up when told the statuary was, originally, brightly painted. It unleashes those two academic fuels, curiosity and imagination.
To give the public a greater understanding of reality, plaster copies of the gods have been cast, and painted as they would have been originally. So too is there a new cottage industry of colorizing black-and-white prints. A monochromatic and uninspiring picture of Coney Island suddenly leaps off the page when colorized, making the people, the setting and era seem real and relatable.
Colorization is not new. In the late 1800s, the mother-daughter team of Elisabeth and Berthe Thuillier had a team of 200 people tediously hand-painting each frame of nascent silent movies, some of the work so delicate that brushes of a single horse hair were employed. Today, anyone with a computer can download colorization software.
But colorization is only the beginning. This metaverse you have been hearing about — imagine the potential for history. What if a young student can walk side by side with McClellan inspecting the troops at Antietam? What if they can stroll a Southern plantation exchanging a word with masters and slaves, or inspect the conditions in a New York tenement or a factory floor during the Industrial Revolution? What if they can go down with the Titanic?
Think any kids might be interested in that? If so we may be on the brink of a spectacular historical renaissance, where instead of ignoring the past we can begin to immerse ourselves in it. And, heaven forbid, even learn from it.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Technological advances can make history vibrant and interesting
