Pic of the Week: Bringing the Navy’s History to Life Through Photos

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Photo by Shawn Miller.

Robert Hanshew, a photo curator for the U.S. Navy, visits the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division almost every Friday to research images related to naval history. Some of his discoveries from the Library’s collections are featured in a major outdoor public history exhibit that opened this summer.

Titled “Behind These Walls,” the exhibit consists of nine-by-seven-foot panels mounted along the historical perimeter of the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard. The panels offer quick, easy lessons for passersby on uses of the Navy Yard since its establishment in 1799.

The 1864 photo shown here depicts six marines holding bayonets at the Navy Yard. It belongs to a group of photographs from 1861 to 1865 that relate to the federal navy and its seaborne expeditions against the Confederacy.

For more details, check out a blog post we published earlier this week in which Hanshew answers questions about his research at the Library.