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Faith and Confidence

1958 Pulitzer Prize winning photograph

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 12, 2026
Entity authorityQ124250307 ↗
Source-derived summary

Faith and Confidence is a Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of two-year-old Allan Weaver asking police officer Maurice Cullinane a question. The 1957 image was captured by photographer William C. Beall in Washington, D.C.

Beall was the chief photographer for The Washington Daily News and he attended a parade in Chinatown, Washington, D.C. where he captured the award-winning image. It was printed in his newspaper and made a deep impression on readers. The image was picked up and reprinted by many other publications including Life magazine.

Background

William C. Beall worked as a staff photographer for The Washington Daily News. On September 10, 1957, he was on H Street in the Chinatown area of Washington, D.C., to photograph the festivities associated with the Hip Sing Chinese Merchants Association Convention. Two-year-old Allan Weaver attended the parade and he approached police officer Maurice Cullinane to ask if he was a US Marine. The image was printed in many publications, including on the back page of Life magazine; it won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Photography.

Description

William Beall's son Denny said his father had taken the image by chance, "He just happened to turn, he saw that and snapped it, just like that: Spin, click, and he had it". William Beall stated that he used an aperture of f16 and a shutter speed of 1⁄100 of a second.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Faith and Confidence” is 1958 Pulitzer Prize winning photograph. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Faith, Confidence and Pulitzer, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1957, 1958—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1957. For this dossier, Faith, Confidence and Pulitzer is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “1958 Pulitzer Prize winning photograph” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q124250307. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1957 and 1958.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Faith and Confidence”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Faith and Confidence primary sources, Faith and Confidence archive and Faith research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Faith and Confidence”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Faith and Confidence” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.