Waging a Visual War on Poverty: President Lyndon B. Johnson in Appalachia

Authors

  • Katharina Fackler University of Regensburg

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.143

Abstract

The article investigates how press photographs shaped poverty discourses in the historical context of the War on Poverty. Using a picture of President Lyndon B. Johnson and a presumably poor woman as a case study, it examines how iconographic elements and the visualized rhetorical pattern of the American jeremiad serve to situate the poor within dominant middle-class ideologies.

Author Biography

Katharina Fackler, University of Regensburg

Katharina Fackler is a doctoral student and lecturer of American Studies at the University of Regensburg. She studied English and French at the University of Regensburg and worked as a teaching assistant in Lorraine, France. In 2010, she completed her teachers’ exam. Since then, she has been teaching American literature and culture and working on her dissertation. Her research on U.S.-American photographic representations of poverty from the 1950s and 1960s has taken her to the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas. Her fields of interest include visual cultures, identity formation, and memory studies.

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How to Cite

Fackler, Katharina. “Waging a Visual War on Poverty: President Lyndon B. Johnson in Appalachia”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 13, May 2012, doi:10.5283/copas.143.

Issue

Vol. 13 (2012)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.