Studying these photos has engendered in me a feeling of sickness, one that is not brought on by simply reading the novels for our English class. The images that were sent through the mail as postcards depict real life pain and suffering to me in a way that reading a fictional account cannot. The novels we are reading accurately portray the feelings and actions of our past, but for some reason do not have the same effect on me. While looking at a postcard such as the one showing three young black men lynched in Minnesota, I am far more disturbed then when I read the passage from The Ox-Bow Incident referring to Gil's disgust of a similar event. I am appalled that not only such acts occurred on a regular basis, but that people were allowed to glorify them in such a horrific manner. The fact that this practice of sending postcards with lynchings on them was happening within the last hundred years is also disturbing, and perhaps is at least some evidence that we have progressed drastically as a society in some respects.
Both works of fiction and also pictures of what really did happen can and should be viewed by our society as a learning experience. While pictures offer us a chance to witness a moment in time, novels attempt to illustrate the feelings and motives associated with these moments in time. Society can see that our past was awful in some ways, and then try to learn why things were that way, and what we can do so that history is not repeated. The pictures of lynchings I saw from across our nation give me proof that our country was wrong, while the novels we are reading for class begin to show me why we were wrong.

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