Photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein is documenting sites important to America's past, with the idea that what he finds there reflects on what's important to people in the present.  Introduction: About this project

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Lawrence, Massachusetts

Above: A man fills out a job application at a restaurant built in a newly renovated section of the Wood Mill in Lawrence, Mass. Most of the huge industrial factories along the Merrimack River are abandoned or have been torn down, but there have been recent efforts to renovate some of the remaining mills. The Wood Mill was at the center of the famous Bread and Roses textile strike of 1912, when thousands of young immigrant women walked off the job because of horrible working conditions. Today a growing Latino population supplies labor for the service industry in the economically depressed town.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Flint, Michigan

Above: In the 1930s the General Motors production plants in the "Chevy In The Hole" complex in Flint, Mich., were among the largest automobile factories in the world, employing thousands of workers. These GM factories played a pivotal role in the sit-down strike of 1935-36, which gave birth to the United Auto Workers and the C.I.O. Today, the area is an abandoned, weed-strewn lot, the workers' homes and bars and churches torn down or rotting like ancient ships abandoned in a concrete sea.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Blair, West Virginia

Above: James Weekly, a former coal miner, refuses to sell his land to mining companies, which are seeking to strip mine the mountain he lives on to remove billions of dollars worth of coal. Blair Mountain is an historic site because of a 1921 four-day gun battle between union coal miners and the National Guard. The state of West Virginia, under pressure from coal companies, has refused to list the mountain as an historic site to be preserved and plans to continue mining the area are moving forward.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

New York, New York

Above: Every year, on the anniversary of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the unions that were born from that disaster hold a rally at the site, next to Washington Square Park in New York's Greenwich Village. On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers, most of them young Italian and Jewish immigrant women from the Lower East Side, died trying to escape the flames. The survivors joined, and built, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

Editor's note: This is Part 3 in a three-part series, History through the lens of today, that we're publishing in PhotoBlog this week.

• Introduction
  
• Part One: Civil rights
• Part Two: Native Americans

Lichtenstein continues this work with the help of a grant from The Aftermath Project. 

Follow @msnbc_pictures

Photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein is documenting sites important to America's past, with the idea that what he finds there reflects on what's important to people in the present.  Introduction: About this project

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Wounded Knee, South Dakota

Above: The small town of Wounded Knee on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota is a place filled with history. It is here in 1890 that the Seventh Cavalry massacred Big Foot's fleeing band in the snow, symbolically ending several centuries of Indian wars. The town was also the site of a 71-day stand off between FBI agents and American Indian Movement activists in 1973. Today the area, like much of the reservation, is mired in rural poverty.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Mystic, Connecticut

Above: The site of the 1637 Pequot Massacre in Mystic, Conn., where colonial troops slaughtered more than 500 women and children by setting a Pequot fort on fire and killing everyone who tried to flee, is now a suburban traffic circle near an Interstate 95 exit. A statue of the colonial soldier who led the raid, Capt. John Mason, used to stand in the circle, but it was moved in 1995 to Windsor, Conn. The Pequot Tribe, which was instrumental in having the statue moved, now owns the Foxwoods Casino, the largest employer in the area.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Sturgis, South Dakota

Above: Bear Butte, on the northern edge of the Black Hills in South Dakota, is where the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes received their creation myth. It is still a religious site of great importance, despite being only a few miles from the biker bars and annual motorcycle rallies of Sturgis. For thousands of years, American Indian tribes, including the Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Kiowa, Arikara, Hidatsa and Mandan, have traveled to Bear Butte to perform annual prayer ceremonies. While the mountain itself is a protected state park, there are plans for oil drilling in the surrounding area.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Winthrop, Massachusetts

Above: Deer Island in Boston Harbor. During the cold winter of 1676, at the height of King Phillip's War, Christian Indians were rounded up from their separate villages across New England and left on the exposed island, without food or blankets. Several hundred Indians who had embraced the colonists' way of life froze or starved to death.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

West Yellowstone, Montana

Above: An estimated 60 million to 100 million bison once wandered across the American wilderness, in herds that stretched across the continent, from Canada to Mexico. By the end of the 1870s, in a conscious policy that combined the interests of the War Department attempting to starve the Indians on the western Plains, settlers seeking new land to farm and hunters out for a quick profit in hides, the animal was on the verge of extinction. In a single decade, millions of bison were slaughtered, their stripped carcasses left to rot where they fell. Today, only one continuous wild herd of around 3,000 animals survives, offspring of 23 stragglers who had managed to escape the slaughter by hiding in what is now Yellowstone National Park. During the winter, the animals are shot when they leave the boundaries of the park to look for food in the lowlands, where the snow is not as deep. Montana ranchers fear the spread of brucellosis to their domesticated cattle herds, even though there has never been a confirmed case of it spreading from bison to cattle.

Editor's note: This is Part 2 in a three-part series, History through the lens of today, that we're publishing in PhotoBlog this week.

• Introduction
  
• Part One: Civil rights

Lichtenstein continues this work with the help of a grant from The Aftermath Project. 

Follow @msnbc_pictures

Photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein is documenting sites important to America's past, with the idea that what he finds there reflects on what's important to people in the present.  Introduction: About this project

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Galveston, Texas

Above: A crowd listens to the annual reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by local officials at a ceremony for Juneteenth, a Texas holiday that commemorates June 19, 1865. On that day slaves were told by a Union general in occupied Galveston that the Emancipation Proclamation, written two years earlier by Abraham Lincoln, had set them free.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Cross Keys, Virginia

Above: There is no marker or monument at Cabin Pond, a small swamp in rural Southampton County, Va., where the slave Nat Turner first received a vision that it was his assigned task to free America's slaves with a rebellion. Cabin Pond is also where Turner planned the rebellion in the summer of 1831 and where he fled to hide after the revolt's failure. A few weeks later he was captured about a mile away. Turner's rebellion so terrified slave owners in the region that they attempted to erase it from history, as well as enacting new laws that made it illegal to teach slaves to read or write.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Montgomery, Alabama

Above: At the exact bus stop where Rosa Parks boarded a city bus for her famous trip to fight segregation in 1955, participants in a Sons of Confederate Veterans "Confederate Heritage Rally" wait to march up Dexter Avenue in downtown Montgomery, Ala., to recreate the 1861 inauguration of Jefferson Davis. Strongly denying that the Civil War had anything to do with the issue of slavery, speakers at the rally celebrated Jeff Davis as “the last president of a truly free Republic.”

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Lake Placid, New York

Above: John Brown's last family home outside Lake Placid, N.Y., is a preserved National Historic Site. Brown moved to the farm, in what was then called North Elba, in the late 1850s at the invitation of the wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith. He came to the remote Adirondack Mountains to help black farmers to whom Smith had given land grants. Soon enough, however, he left the community, known as Timbuktu, to plan his raid on the federal arsenal in Harper's Ferry, Va.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Memphis, Tennessee

Above: The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, is now the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum recreated King’s last room, with cigarettes in the ashtray and the bed sheet pulled down. Mahalia Jackson’s song “Oh Precious Lord,” King’s favorite song, plays over a set of speakers, and visitors from around the world still come to pay their respect, to both the man and the dream.

Editor's note: This is Part 1 in a three-part series, History through the lens of today, that we're publishing in PhotoBlog this week.

• Introduction
• Part Two: Native Americans

Lichtenstein continues this work with the help of a grant from The Aftermath Project. 

Follow @msnbc_pictures

Photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein is documenting sites important to America's past, with the idea that what he finds there reflects on what's important to people in the present.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Former coal miner James Weekly refuses to sell his land in Blair, West Virginia, to mining companies, which are seeking to strip mine the mountain he lives on to remove billions of dollars worth of coal.

Lichtenstein picked historical sites that were interesting to him, regardless of whether they were famous, infamous or obscure. “I’m not interested in George Washington crossing the Delaware,” he says. “I'm looking for events and sites that speak more to the struggle for civil rights, the largely undocumented or under-reported labor history in the U.S., and the conquest of the native people that were here.” Then he tried to make a picture of the historic site, but with the influence of the present.

"In some ways it's more interesting when you go there and you find nothing, no connection to the past," Lichtenstein says, "Like Nat Turner's cabin pond, where you go there and there's no sign, no signifier that you're in this historical place. The history was erased right after it happened, deliberately."

His visits to the historic sites raised a question: “Why is it that the sites of labor massacres across the country are little known and obscure? These are choices that we make: to make the Liberty Bell and the signing of the Declaration of Independence these giant tourist attractions. What we choose to remember and why we choose to remember it is what makes us who are."

Andrew Lichtenstein / Facing Change

Wounded Knee on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota is the site of an Indian massacre in 1890. Today the area is mired in poverty.

"If something's become a museum or memorialized, it's often too late for me. But on the other hand, if I get there and there's no indication or no connection to history, I'm also stuck. Sometimes I can see it in something discarded on the ground. But sometimes I struggle to find anything symbolic. To me it's a fascinating process and something I feel that this project can really bring out or discover.”

It also prompts a larger question for Lichtenstein: "How do we define ourselves as a society? The past is always more about the present than the past. The events we choose to interpret and talk about now are more about who we are now than who we were before. 

Lichtenstein uses what some might consider a historic means to capture his images. “I knew I wanted to work in film – the first thought was to take a large-format camera to historical events. But very few events are clearly historical as they're happening – 9/11 and Obama's election are obvious. I'm looking for something that's not so obvious in the present, but becomes clear after time goes by. Some things are just chatter that goes by.”

Timothy H. O'Sullivan / Library of Congress

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Gen. George G. Meade, Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, and numerous staff officers meet in Massaponax Church, Va., on May 21, 1864.

In this age of digital everything you may wonder why Lichtenstein chooses to photograph this project on film. “There are many things I love about digital photography,” he says, “But black and white images are not one of them. I want to feel that grain.” The image above, of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and numerous staff officers, was the first photograph that really got Lichtenstein thinking about this project. “I just love the blurry movement of some of the soldiers and the horses and mules,” he says. “It’s what made me want to work in large format, which, after some trials and many errors, I realized I was not organized enough to do,” he says. He settled on using a medium-format camera instead.

“History and photography are my two great loves,” says Lichtenstein. “I wanted to do something that really drew on those connections and made them front and center.”  Lichtenstein plans to cover the entire nation. He says he’s about 60 percent finished with his project and plans to do more work in the West. 

Editor's note: This is the introduction to a three-part series, History through the lens of today, that we're publishing in PhotoBlog this week.

• Part One: Civil Rights
• Part Two: Native Americans
• Part Three: Worker Rights

Lichtenstein continues this work with the help of a grant from The Aftermath Project.

Follow @msnbc_pictures