This document is an example of a mass media photograph, commonly used in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. The first photographs in the United States were used to report on important events during the American Civil War, with images from the battlefield making their way to living rooms across the nation for the first time in the nation’s history. By the twentieth century, the medium was commonplace, and photography helped influence public opinion in the nation (and world) on numerous occasions, such as during the modern civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, when images shocked Americans by bringing the reality of those events to the forefront of people’s daily lives.