A scientific explorer for the United States Department of Agriculture, Gerow D. Brill (Class of 1888) traveled across the Philippines in 1902 and photographed placid scenes of rice fields, coconut groves, sugar mills, duck farms, and thatch-roofed villages. But his idyllic images also illuminate the tumultuous U.S. annexation of the archipelago in the aftermath of the Philippine-American War, according to Claire Cororaton, a Ph.D. student in history at Cornell.