Web Journal

Popular/Public History on the Web: Challenging the Audience

Among the sites examined for this week (Week 11), the site that provides the interpretation that most challenges its audience is Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America. Without Sanctuary is a narrated collection of over 80 images of the effects of lynching in the United States. The site's interpretation focuses on the victims of lynching, the hapless victims of white aggression and cruelty. Among the victims depicted are Jesse Washington, a 17-year-old boy who was beaten, burned, and paraded around Waco, Texas, for his supposed guilt for murder, and Leonard Woods, a coal miner near Whitesburg, Kentucky, who was shot over 100 times before several men set his body on fire. Conversely, the identites of the white perpetrators of the lynching remain largly anonymous. The site does not discuss why the lynchings occurred, or hwo their stories fit into a larger historical narrative; It merely acts as a portal into the visual spectacle of lynching, using the images captured on film to give a human reality to the violence that characterized much of what early twentieth-century Americans and historians have called "race relations."

Provocative and shocking in its content, Without Sanctuary exposes visitors to the effects of racism and mob violence in America, and the powerful role of the photographer in the spectacle of lynching. The site is not powerful simply because of the content of each picture; it is powerful because of the volume of the pictures available and the commonality of the victims' images as "collectors items." As such, the site challenges its viewers to move away from a sanitized interpretation of the past and look full-face at the violence that characterized much of the early twentieth century. Seeing the gruesome images that were as valued as pieces of a lynching victim's body, visitors to Without Sanctuary can better understand that "race relations" is a far milder term that is warranted from the historical record.

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