Our Army Before Yorktown, Virginia Possibly 1862

Winslow Homer created this print, "Our Army Before Yorktown, Virginia," for *Harper's Weekly*, a popular periodical during the Civil War. Published during a time of intense national division, Homer's work brings into focus the visual strategies used to shape public perceptions of the war. Although Homer would later focus on individual narratives, here he employs a survey approach. Through a series of vignettes he aims to represent the scale of the Union Army's presence. While seemingly objective, consider how the absence of explicit violence or suffering impacts our understanding of the war's reality. Instead, we're presented with ordered lines of soldiers, tidy encampments, and the technological might of the Union Navy. This approach served to normalize and perhaps even sanitize the experience of war for civilian audiences. Homer's artistic choices reflect the complex and often contradictory ways in which the war was understood and portrayed in the public sphere. Ultimately, this print encourages us to question the narratives we consume and to consider whose stories are being told, and how.