September 1897 (Musser and Nelson)	September 1898 (Musser and Nelson)

During the Spanish-American War the various cinematic apparatuses battling for economic dominance in the 1890s were literally transformed into signifying war machines, standardized and hegemonized around the themes of imperialism and war. "The movies became so identified with war news," notes Allen, "that Edison renamed his Projecting Kinetoscope the 'Wargraph' for the duration of the hostilities" ("Movies in Vaudeville" 74). Other exhibitors provided similar, generic names for their projecting war machines (e.g., Warscope) through the turn of the century (Hollyman 190; Musser, "American Vitagraph" 42; Emergence 252). The transformation of Howe's prewar Animotiscope and the image of the train in September of 1897, to the War-Graph with new cinematic icon of the battleship a year later, is symptomatic of the hypermilitarization of United States media culture during the Spanish-American War.