Snapshots of History
If you use Twitter, you’ve probably seen retweets from an account like @HistoryInPics or @HistoricalPics pop up in your stream. You may not remember which account it was, exactly—there are a bunch of them, and they’re difficult to tell apart. I count 14 Twitter accounts currently using a variant of the @HistoryPics handle: @HistoricalPics, @HistoryInPix, @History_Pics, and so on. Four of the 14 claim to be “THE ORIGINAL,” and most of them reuse each other’s material liberally.
Even discounting the repetition of particular images, there’s a sameness in tone to the tweets that come from these accounts. “History,” as these accounts define it, is a landscape peopled by JFK, the Beatles, Steve Jobs, various movie stars, pretty girls wearing miniskirts, quirky mustachioed bicyclists, and concentration-camp survivors. Even the accounts’ avatars are similar: The classic 1863 Alexander Gardner daguerrotype of Lincoln in a bow tie appears three times. Three other accounts use stylized logos featuring old-timey cameras.