MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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The Spy Photo That Fooled NPR, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center, and Me
By artappraiser on Fri, 06/28/2013 - 3:02am |A story of a mistaken identity reveals a lot about the history of black women in America, the challenges of understanding the past, and who we are today.
By Lois Leveen, The Atlantic, June 27, 2013
t's a blurry image. But in some ways that makes it the perfect portrait of Mary Bowser, an African American woman who became a Union spy during the Civil War by posing as a slave in the Confederate White House. What better representation of a spy who hid in plain sight than a photograph whose subject stares straight at the viewer yet whose features remain largely indecipherable? Small wonder the photograph has been circulated by NPR, Wikipedia, libraries, history projects, and in my book, The Secrets of Mary Bowser. There's only one problem: The woman in the photograph was no Union spy. How did we get it so wrong? [....]
URL:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/the-spy-photo-that-fooled-npr-the-us-army-intelligence-center-and-me/277276/
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