"This article is a self-critical, historically informed progress report to assess ways that different forms of visual media admit and frustrate public expression and education. Reviewing more than a decade of digital projects produced by the American Social History Project and its collaborators, I consider ways that the design of visual digital projects may provide opportunities for active learning on the part of users and a renewed dialogue between new media producers and consumers. Some of the clues to creative interactivity in the new visual media of the present may be found by referring back 150 years to the visual technologies of the past."