The American Wars Before and After the Industrial Revolution

The American Wars before and after the Industrial Revolution

Before the Industrial Revolution, the only things people knew of wars were what had been painted and told to them, as H. Bruce Franklin mentions in his writing: “prior to Civil War, visual images of America’s wars were almost without expectation expressions of romanticism and nationalism” (402). Franklin, in his essay “From Realism to Virtual Reality: Images of America’s Wars,” clearly and precisely describes how the wars before and after the Industrial Revolution look using organization, tone, and images.

Franklin uses organization effectively to guide his audience through different kinds of wars. In the beginning of his essay, Franklin takes his audience through the Civil War. In this journey, Franklin tells his audience that “literature, however, was the only art form capable of projecting the action of warfare as temporal flow and movement” (403). Moreover, he tells his audience about how the wars were embedded in the minds of the American people as “a glorious saga of thrilling American heroism from the Revolution through the Mexican War” (402). However, Franklin shows how all these glamorizing images of wars start to vanish after the Industrial Revolution, and he emphasizes this clearly in his essay when he mentions the photo harvest of Death, Gettysburg and how the people for the first time see the corpses of the Confederate soldiers on the battlefield. As a result of that, Franklin shows how the number of commercial photographers grew faster, looking for wealth by following the army into the battlefield: “Scores of commercial photographers, seeking authenticity and profits, followed the Union armies into battle” (403). He is telling us how the wars become a pr...

... middle of paper ...

...the actual killing; that is why they show only a building being destroyed. Franklin’s uses of these images are to add more credibility to his essay because a picture is worth a thousand wards.

The writer introduces his topic very clearly using different tools. He makes his work simple and easy to understand because he is directing his work to the public. Franklin’s use of organization is intended to make it easy for the reader to progress through time. In addition, he uses an informative tone to inform, not only to persuade, the reader; he wants his audience to draw their own conclusions. Moreover, he uses images to show his audience the affect of photos before and after the Industrial Revolution, and he shows two different images to compare. Franklin shows the wars without makeup as he says, “why not project the war from the point of view of the weapons?” (412).