Shocking Display of WarIn October 1862, Mathew Brady shocked the United States when he displayed photographs of battlefield corpses at Antietam. Americans believed that Brady & Co's images showed them the unfiltered truth of the Civil War. In fact, they were actually viewing carefully curated storytelling. Many Forms of Photographic ManipulationCivil War photographers didn't just move bodies; they manipulated images in several ways: Selective Framing: Photographers chose what to include and what to exclude in their photographs. Camp scenes might emphasize order and heroism while hiding the messy realities of camp life, like disease, desertion, and demoralization. A careful crop could transform a mundane battlefield into an iconic scene of sacrifice. Technical Enhancement: Studio technicians sometimes retouched prints, enhanced skies, added smoke, or combined multiple negatives to overcome the limitations of early photographic technology. Their goal wasn't always to deceive; sometimes they enhanced photographs simply to create clearer images of a print. Captions and Context: Perhaps most powerfully, Brady's team wrote evocative captions and arranged exhibitions to elicit specific emotional responses. Every photograph's impact depended on curatorial choices: what to show, what to hide, and what story to tell. The photographers weren't necessarily trying to lie. They were trying to convey the emotional truths--the horror, sacrifice, and humanity of the war. Sometimes this meant sacrificing factual precision. Commercial Incentives: Brady and Gardner ran businesses. Dramatic images sold better than mundane ones. Brady spent over $100,000 (roughly $2 million today) on his Civil War documentation, expecting the U.S. government to purchase the collection. When it didn't, he faced bankruptcy. [9] The Lesson We ForgetArt has never been neutral. The portraits and images made about the American Revolution were often meant to flatter the Founders and portray heroic scenes. The photographs taken by Brady, Gardner, and their colleagues/competitors to document and portray the Civil War were likewise shaped by artistic and business choices: how to frame the image, how to stage it, the time of day it was taken, and its presentation were choices the photographers made. Even when the photographers didn't move bodies or enhance skies, they chose where to point their cameras and when to press the shutter. We've forgotten this important lesson. So when the television arrived, we believed our new moving pictures couldn't lie. But just as with photographs, video can be edited and adapted by the creator. Now, OpenAI and other companies have made video fabrication as easy as typing a sentence. In 1863, Alexander Gardner and his assistant moved a soldier's body 40 yards and created a fabricated image that has since helped shape our public memory of the Battle of Gettysburg. With OpenAI's Sora app, anyone can create an entirely fabricated video in seconds. The technology of image-making has changed. But do we have a willingness to deeply consider whether what we see is real or fake? β π¬ Final ThoughtHistory tells us who we are and how we came to be who we are. Can a republic survive when its citizens are bombarded with unreliable images and information? Can a democracy function when images and words can be manipulated to serve partisan ends? Two and half centuries later, the United States and its people are still testing these questions. Sora doesn't create new problems; it amplifies old ones. Benjamin Franklin used images like his iconic "Join or Die" snake to build a nation. John Trumbull used heroic paintings to unite the American people. And Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner used photographs to help their fellow Americans see and understand the realities of their nation's Civil War. Today, Americans might use AI-generated videos to achieve the same effects, or they may use them to tear down our democratic republic. The question isn't whether the technology exists; it's whether we'll develop better civic habits of skepticism, verification, and critical thinking to help us tell fact from fiction. β π§ Go DeeperInvestigate the early American world of misinformation with these episodes of Ben Franklin's World: Misinformation Nationβ Revolutionary Networksβ The Common Causeβ β π¬ What Do You Think?For 160 years, "seeing was believing." Now that realistic video can be so easily fabricated with a text prompt, what becomes our standard for truth--and who's responsible for maintaining it? π© Hit Reply to share your thoughts.β Have a great weekend, β π¨ Enjoy This Newsletter? β Forward it to a friend! π¬ Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here. β β€οΈ Support Ben Franklinβs WorldYou power this newsletterβand the effort to keep history in the headlines. π Support our workβ β P.S. Interesting Family ConnectionThe American Civil War always seems so modern to the American Revolutionary Era I study. But I admit the research for this issue fascinated me. Family lore claims we are related to Mathew B. Brady. No documentary evidence that I've seen exists for this, but the photographic evidence is compelling: The Brady men all share distinctive noses and ears that run through my maternal line. Coincidentally, I'm also working in media, trying to provide credible information. Like Brady, historians make choices that shape how we view reality. For example, I could have used John Trumbull's paintings and what he chose to include and exclude from his images of the Revolutionary War. Instead, I decided to highlight Civil War photography because I thought it made a stronger case that Americans have always confronted falseness in images we take for fact. The past happened, history is made. Historians make choices about what evidence to examine, how to interpret it, and what stories they tell. Even when we try to be objective, we're influenced by our present. There's a smart saying: A good history book will tell you as much about the period it studies as it does about the period it was written in. Be discerning. Check the evidence to see who historians cite, where their evidence comes from, and who they choose not to cite. Knowledge creation is never neutral, even we try. I haven't forgotten your requests for information about how to spot fake information and images. Consider this newsletter the start of my response. β π End Notes[1] Ashley Capoot, "OpenAI's invite-only video generation app Sora tops Apple's App Store," CNBC, October 3, 2025, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/03/openai-sora-apple-app-store.html; Gerrit De Vynck and Drew Harwell, "Everything is fake on Silicon Valley's hottest new social network," The Washington Post, October 2, 2025, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/02/sora-openai-video-face-fake/; "Sora 2 is here," OpenAI, September 30, 2025, accessed October 9, 2025, https://openai.com/index/sora-2/; "Motion Picture Association Blasts OpenAI Over Sora 2 Video Copyright Opt-Outs," Variety, October 7, 2025, accessed October 9, 2025, https://variety.com/2025/film/news/motion-picture-association-openai-sora-2-copyright-1236541775/. [2] Carl Franzen, "OpenAI debuts Sora 2 AI video generator app with sound and self-insertion cameos, API coming soon," VentureBeat, September 30, 2025, accessed October 9, 2025, https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-debuts-sora-2-ai-video-generator-app-with-sound-and-self-insertion/; Sam Sabin, "AI video apps are a scammer's goldmine," Axios, October 7, 2025, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.axios.com/2025/10/07/openai-sora-scammers-deepfakes. [3] Malcolm Daniel, "Daguerre (1787-1851) and the Invention of Photography," The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/daguerre-1787-1851-and-the-invention-of-photography; "The Daguerrotype Medium," Library of Congress, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.loc.gov/collections/daguerreotypes/articles-and-essays/the-daguerreotype-medium; "Daguerrotype Process: 1840-1860s," Historic New Orleans Collection, accessed October 9, 2025, https://hnoc.org/virtual-exhibitions/from_daguerreotype_to_digital/daguerreotype-process; "The Daguerrian Era and Early American Photography on Paper, 1839-1860," The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 1, 2004, accssed October 9, 2025, https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/the-daguerreian-era-and-early-american-photography-on-paper-1839-1860. [4] "Daguerrotype Process: 1840-1860s," Historic New Orleans Collection, accessed October 9, 2025, https://hnoc.org/virtual-exhibitions/from_daguerreotype_to_digital/daguerreotype-process; "Daguerrotype," Wikipedia, accessed October 9, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daguerreotype. [5] "Daguerrotype Process: 1840-1860s," Historic New Orleans Collection, accessed October 9, 2025, https://hnoc.org/virtual-exhibitions/from_daguerreotype_to_digital/daguerreotype-process; Georgen Charnes, "Daguerreotypes: The First Photographs," Nantucket Historical Association, Summer 2004, accessed October 9, 2025, https://nha.org/research/nantucket-history/history-topics/daguerreotypes-first-photographs/. [6] "Pennsylvania, Gettysburg. The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter," July 1863, U.S. National Archives, accessed October 9, 2025, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/533315; "Alexander Gardner, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, from Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War," 1865, MoMA, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/86695; "Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter," Wikipedia, accessed October 9, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_of_a_Rebel_Sharpshooter, [7] "Mathew Brady: Biographical Note," Library of Congress, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-war-glass-negatives/articles-and-essays/mathew-brady-biographical-note/; "Mathew Brady," American Battlefield Trust, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/mathew-brady; "Mathew Brady," Wikipedia, accessed October 9, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathew_Brady. [8] "Brady's Photographs: Pictures of the Dead at Antietam," The New York Times, October 20, 1862, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/1862/10/20/archives/bradys-photographs-pictures-of-the-dead-at-antietam.html; "Brady's Album Gallery," Library of Congress, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2005688698/. [9] "Alexander Gardner, Mathew Brady, and Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, Library of Congress, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.loc.gov/static/collections/civil-war-glass-negatives/articles-and-essays/does-the-camera-ever-lie/introduction.html; "Alexander Gardner, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, from Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War," 1865, MoMA, accessed October 9, 2025, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/8669; "Mathew Brady," Wikipedia, accessed October 9, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathew_Brady. β π Further ReadingJoseph Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). Cindy L. Otis, True or False: A CIA Analyst's Guide to Spotting Fake News, (New York: Square Fish, 2022). Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2019). Nicholas J.C. Pistor, Shooting Lincoln: Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and the Race to Photograph the Story of the Century, (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2017). Jordan E. Taylor, Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022). Affiliate Disclosure: Book links in this newsletter are affiliate links through Bookshop.org. If you purchase a book through these links, Ben Franklin's World earns a small commission at no extra cost to you. Your purchase helps support History Behind the Headlines and independent bookstores. Thank you for your support!
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