Two Free Library events this week mark Black History Month with volumes about the past that have messages for the present.

Stories of real human beings make history powerful. Photographs make it immediate.

Outstanding examples of both are on the schedule as the Free Library of Philadelphia begins a series of Black History Month programs this week.

On Tuesday, eminent civil rights historian Taylor Branch will talk about his new book, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement (Simon & Schuster, $26), a 190-page distillation of his magisterial three-volume history, America in the King Years, the product of 24 years of research.

On Thursday, historian Barbara Krauthamer and photographer, artist, and curator Deborah Willis will present a slide program and discuss their new book, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (Temple University Press, $35).

The collection of rare and archival photos from the mid-19th century offers a visual history of the final years of American slavery, the fight for emancipation, and the Civil War and its aftermath.

     Branch, who turned 66 last month, says he was asked to condense his history for students and general readers who couldn't handle the 2,300-page trilogy, which includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters (1988), Pillar of Fire (1998) and At Canaan's Edge (2006).

  The new book concentrates on 18 key moments in the civil rights movement, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s first public address, at the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, the Freedom Rides in 1961, and the 1963 march on Washington. It covers King's uneasy relationship with John and Robert Kennedy and his troubled history with the FBI.

Branch says he made sure to include chapters on the movement's roots in the black church and on lesser known civil rights figures, such as student leaders and educators Bob Moses and Diane Nash. He constructed the new book for the most part with excerpts from the trilogy that he connected with new introductory text. It was easier than he had expected.

"I had to overcome author's pride [and admit] that every word of the trilogy may not be meant to be for the ages," he says in a phone interview. "And console myself that those books aren't going away and are still in print for anyone who needs to consult them."

Branch says that, above all, he never compromised his guiding principle: That history is best told through narrative, through stories, rather than through statistics and analysis.

"My conviction is that . . . people learn through stories that are human and not ideas that are abstract," he says. "Storytelling is the way to humanize. I really think that is the way we learn."

It's the way Branch, a white middle-class kid in segregated Atlanta, first became open to the movement's promise, he says.

"I was conscious of it early on [as a young child] and I was frightened by it," Branch says. He describes his family as liberal Southerners who never indoctrinated him in segregation, but who at the same time taught him "never to make trouble. . . . never rock the boat."

By the time he was 16, Branch began realizing the immorality of the entire system.

"I grew up in a very religious family, and if you grow up and care about what Christianity teaches and if you grow up caring about the promise of democracy, then it becomes obvious" which side in the civil rights struggle to support.

Branch says we have yet to appreciate the importance the movement continues to play in American politics.

"Race is the doorway to freedom," he says. "It liberated the South, it led to the liberation of senior citizens, certainly women and gays."

Things will get decidedly visual at Thursday evening's program on Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, a collection of 150 photos collected and annotated by Krauthamer, an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and her coauthor Willis, a Philadelphia-born artist and photographer who is department chair and professor of photography and imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

(Krauthamer and Willis will present their program a second time, on Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. at Temple University's Mitten Hall, Great Court, 1913 N. Broad Street.)

The 224-page book is organized into three historical eras - the pre-Civil War emancipation movement, the Civil War, and the first decades after the war - each with a brief introductory essay.

"Deb [Willis] and I have been talking to each other from the early 2000s about photographs we kept coming across in our academic work," says Krauthamer, whose next book, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, a history of Native American attitudes toward black slaves, is due in August.

Their interests were piqued when the scholars separately happened on a wanted poster from 1863 about a runaway slave named Dolly.

The notice offers a $50 reward and features a photograph of Dolly which obviously was cropped from a larger photo.

"We each had seen this document and seen this photograph and we both were captivated by it," Krauthamer says in a phone interview. "Why was that photo taken in the first place," Krauthamer says she asked herself. "Did it show Dolly sitting with the rest of her owner's family?"

She was intrigued.

But why would slave owners spend the time and money to have their slaves photographed in the first place?

To show off their wealth, the historian says. Just as landowners have for centuries commissioned paintings of their estates, planters in the Antebellum South had pictures taken of their slaves as a way to show off their property.

"The number of slaves you had was a measure of your wealth and your status," Krauthamer says.

A prevalent photographic theme, Krauthamer explains, was the image of a female slave holding a white child in her arms. "Even though in many cases, the slave was the children's primary caregiver, she functions in these images as a human chair, an ornamentation like the table or lamp," which are also shown.

At the same time, the photos "helped reinforce the slaveholders' illusion that the slaves are part of the family . . . and are well cared for," Krauthamer says.

The emancipation movement helped introduce a new way to portray black Americans - as ordinary citizens worthy of respect, even as heroes.

"For someone like Frederick Douglass or Charlotte Forten and other prominent black abolitionists, having their portrait taken was a means of visually representing African American dignity, honor, and beauty," says Krauthamer.

The photos helped spread a new way for African Americans - and their white neighbors - to think about themselves as individuals. It was a new way for them to construct a self-image, says Krauthamer.

"Some, like Sojourner Truth, had their picture taken and sold copies of it as a means of supporting herself," says Krauthamer.

"A woman sent a letter to Sojourner Truth saying, 'I wish I had the money to buy many more photos for all the women in my family, but I only can buy two,' " Krauthamer says.

"In the letter the woman talked about how important Sojourner was in her life and how important it was for her to continue spreading her message."