Jeremy Adelman, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Princeton University: "The Witness and the Other: Photography and the Origins of Humanitarianism”
Between 1850 and 1914, there was a worldwide double transformation. As markets stitched regions and countries together, so did new technologies and practices in what we now call the media. Globe-trotting reporters, truth commissions, and photojournalism altered the way people around the planet developed images and stories about far-away places and people. This lecture asks how this double transformation affected self-interests in, and compassion for, strangers; did global integration lay the groundwork for a humanitarian revolution?