American History Needs More Names

American History Needs More Names

As a scholar of 19th-century American photography, I’ve looked at countless old photographs: the carefully labeled portraits of the powerful (always the most likely to be photographed), and the many pictures of women and children, enslaved workers and Native families, rural laborers and urban bystanders, that include no identifications at all. Some years ago, I began to wonder whether I could identify some of the unnamed people in old photograph…