As the senses of sight and touch separated with the industrial mapping of the body in the nineteenth century, the visible and the visualized aligned themselves in medical, scientific, and sexological discourses; even history claimed to make the past “visible.” The criteria of the visible came to mark modernity. Cultural studies of visualization technologies help us to understand history itself as sign of the modern and to join its desires for the visible to those desires for spectacle produced among observers (...) of visualizing media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (shrink)