2001 Annual Grant Issue
Mark Rabuck: Kast Grant Report
Digital Image Database: Creating an Image Archive for Curricular Use

When I teach history, I like to provide as many visual images for my students as possible. Texts can only go so far in helping students establish a connection with a past civilization, and images often provide students with insights about material culture and values that would otherwise elude them. GA's library already has an outstanding collection of Art History images, ranging from Neolithic cave art to postmodern architecture. However, while such images have great utility in the history classroom, they can only allow insight into a limited field of history- those segments of society, which produce "high art." For the history teacher who desires visual materials pertaining to political, economic, or social history, the pickings are few, either at GA or on the Web.

I resolved to spend the summer creating a database of visual images. I already had a large store of images in hand from my trips to Britain and Italy over the past five years. I decided to increase my stock of images by traveling to France and visiting regions with significant sites pertaining to several periods of European history, from the Stone Age to the Space Age. I decided that digital images would be the most useful way to catalogue, and store the images I collected. Teachers could then use the images in Xerox handouts, web pages, or PowerPoint slideshows as they saw fit. To this end, I acquired an Olympus digital camera, which is now kept by the US/MS library. As I planned my trip, I solicited requests from members of my department. Kendall Mattern and Ben Olshin requested photos from a WWI battlefield as they pieced together their new history elective/distance learning course. David Hillinck sought images that reflected increasing globalization in European culture.

I left for France shortly after graduation in order to beat the French vacances in August. I was accompanied by my wife Cynthia, a whiz at booking airline reservations through the Web and who can sniff out a good restaurant at eight hundred paces. My job was to secure lodgings-charming traditional hotels that would not bankrupt us. Both of us accomplished our mission. The image below is of our hotel in Chanonceau, a former inn on the stagecoach route that connected Paris and Bordeaux before the rails were built. Life is rough sometimes.

Our first four days were spent in Paris. We stayed on the Ile-Saint-Louis, just a five-minute walk from the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. On our first afternoon, the square in front of Notre Dame showed the potential of my project. In addition to the striking gothic façade of the cathedral (already in our slide library), the square contained memorial plaques to Resistance soldiers who fell on the spot, a public hospital that had stood on the spot since the Middle Ages, and a nineteenth-century bronze statue of Charlemagne that showed more about Romantic idealization of the Middle Ages than about the medieval era itself.

In the ensuing days, we hit the museums (the classical wings of the Louvre, the military museum of Les Invalides, and the Bibliotheque Nationale), shot street scenes of medieval, early modern, and Haussman-era Paris, and made the obligatory pilgrimage to Versailles. To keep Hillinck happy, I shot photos of the McDonald's on the Champs-Elysees (now serving Le Croque McDo!) and of the Gap in the feisty medieval neighborhood of the Latin Quarter.

As much as we enjoyed our time in Paris, it was only after we rented our car and plunged into the countryside that we fell in love with France. Our journey took us to the medieval cathedral town of Chartres, the "feminine" chateau of Chenonceau, and the market town of Cahors. Along the way, we stopped at medieval bridges, eighteenth century mills, nineteenth century viaducts, and graveyards that have been in continuous operation for centuries. On other days, we made side trips to shoot nuclear and wind power plants, various types of farms and rural dwellings, and Neolithic monuments.

Our next extended stop was in the town of Carcassonne. Admittedly, this was pure greed from my point of view, since I am a medieval junkie to the core. As charming as the lovingly restored walled town was, though, it was again evident that the heavy hand of nineteenth century Romanticism had left its imprint on the city, leaving the postcard-perfect city feeling somewhat Disneyland-esque. It was in the countryside between Carcassonne and the Spanish border that we discovered the true French Middle Ages, visiting a wonderfully preserved market town and castle in Foix and a Cathar heretic stronghold at Montsegur. Our climb to the summit of Montsegur proved to be the most strenuous physical activity Cindy or I had undertaken in years. We developed a new appreciation for the poor Crusaders who had to climb the peak in full armor while the castle's defenders lobbed stones on their heads.

Our next stop was Arles, where I was able to broaden my collection of Roman era images. Arles itself is full of well-preserved Roman ruins, including a theater, an arena, and a burial ground. The modern antiquities museum contains many well-preserved finds. Just a few miles away are the ruins of the Roman town of Glanum, a small but important administrative and ritual center for the province of Gaul. On one monument alone were images of Caesar's military triumph, enslaved Gauls, and the creation of new citizens in the recently conquered territory-a masterful work of propaganda that is in itself a history lesson about the spread of Rome's empire.

Life is suffering, the Buddha concluded, but the Buddha never traveled to Provence. A tip from our waitress in one restaurant led us to the vineyard below where some excellent rosés are produced.

With tears in our eyes, Cynthia and I left Provence and headed north, to the Champagne and Lorraine regions. We stopped briefly at Autun, home of the most distinctive Romanesque sculpture in Europe, before establishing our last base camp in Troyes. Troyes is a well-preserved late medieval town that still looks much like it did in the sixteenth century. The narrow alleys and timber frame homes provide a glimpse of what a market town would have felt like as Europe began urbanizing.

Troyes is not far from the battlefield of Verdun, the site of one of the most brutal battles in the First World War. The battlefield is remarkably intact and approachable. The casual tourist can climb into the trenches, feel the original barbed wire, and collect shell casings from the site of the battle (French farmers still find several tons of unexploded ammunition near the battlefield each year. Warning signs are common). Although the forest has reclaimed much of the land where the fighting was most intense and we were there on a sunny and pleasant day, the visit was still moving. The scars in the earth were still vivid, and the French did a good job of conveying the human toll of the battle.

Leaving France on that somber note, we flew back to the states on July 5. I spent the next six weeks writing a catalogue of the images I collected, which totals over a hundred pages in a word-processing format. As of this writing, though, the project remains unfinished. I still await the software that I will use to make the archive a useful tool, connecting text and image for teachers' use.