The past century's technological revolution has returned images to a central place in people's individual and collective lives. Photography became widely popular in the first half of the past century, creating new visual forms of high art, mass advertising, and amateur entertainment. During the latter half of the twentieth century, innovations in digital imaging and network technologies have made visuals a primary mode of global communication in print, on screens, and online--becoming at times both the means and the message. The authors contend that visual literacy is a critical skill for twenty-first-century students and ought to be a central component of a liberal education. They present two examples illustrating that visual resources are one tool for helping students achieve the essential learning outcomes of liberal education. Liberal education in the twenty-first century needs to take seriously the visual as a fundamental way of knowing. As meaning is increasingly made through the combination of text and image, visual literacy is essential for understanding disciplines as well as local and global cultures.