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As I am from metropolitan Atlanta, I was drawn to Katherine Taylor’s three part series, Atlanta Flooding. I was struck by the fact that I did not remember the flood at all. The VAC’s description notes that the heavy rains that caused the flood in Atlanta in 2009 also affected Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and Arkansas, but I suppose because I was not aversely impacted, I didn’t make the effort to commit the event to memory.
The first thing I felt when looking at these painting was guilt. I felt guilty that I couldn’t remember an event that apparently caused culvert failure, school closings, and homes to be destroyed less than thirty minutes away from my home. Floods are topics of historic, biblical, and often cultural import, but with modern technology, they are now localized. Unless a flood garners a wide media following, it will rarely cause an outside party to think twice on it. I decided to do research on other floods in my area once I got back to my room, and did not feel guilty that I could not remember other natural disasters. I think the difference between my two reactions was that one event was depicted visually and the others in writing. Visual appeals to emotions can often be more effective at swaying an individual’s opinion than written appeals to reason (this is a crass oversimplification of a complex psychological issue, and there are many exceptions to this notion, but for the sake of space I’ll leave it here).
Why is this significant, and how can students of history benefit from an understanding of this idea? In order to be an informed global citizen, students should recognize the types of appeals texts make. Political cartoons, photographs, and films often inspire more intense reactions than academic dissertations, pamphlets, and news articles. They can lead to riots and play instrumental parts in revolutions. To know that emotion plays a key part in historical events is to be one step closer to understanding those events. In this sense, introspection and empathy are useful. However, too much empathy can lead to bias. For example, when a student is selecting sources to use in a paper, he should keep his own reaction to a text in mind. As Eli pointed out, historians often need to distance themselves emotionally from their topics in order to present a fair and accurate depiction. That’s not to say art should not be used as a source, but that it should be used with the understanding that it can sway a writer or reader without their knowledge.
Were I to write a paper on recent southern floods, I would have to consider the guilt I felt when looking on Atlanta Flooding when deciding whether or not to use it as a source. According to the VAC description, the artist combines colors, painting and drawing techniques, and stains on the paper to illustrate her point that floods are “contradictory” and “distorted.” I could use that analysis to my advantage were I to write a paper on the confusing and distorting effects of floods on southerners, or I could combine this series with other texts in order to make the point that while some southerners think floods are contradictory and distorting, they aren’t as disruptive as they appear. The quality would depend on my own conscientiousness as a writer and on my ability to incorporate other texts effectively. Toeing the line between empathy and emotional distance in a class on disasters will be a challenge this semester, but with this assignment as an introduction, I think it will prove to be a very manageable one.