The Power of Images

From an Economist review of Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains and Steven Wise's Though the Heavens May Fall, two books about the slave trade:

Both authors remind us how a committed minority can persuade a majority to see what at first they cannot or do not want to see. In one of many vivid passages, Mr Hochschild describes a simple but electrifying piece of evidence that Clarkson placed before an enquiry into the slave trade by the Privy Council in 1788. It was a diagram of a slave ship, the Brookes, showing slaves tightly packed and chained in rows. For many people, this was perhaps the first time that the reality of the slave trade had impinged upon them: with their own eyes, they could see its cruelty.

Whole thing here.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.