In the early 20th century, postcards were one of the most important and popular expressions of holiday sentiment in American culture. Millions of such postcards circulated among networks of community and kin as part of a larger American postcard craze. However, their uses and meanings were far from universal. This book argues that holiday postcards circulated primarily among rural and small town, Northern, white women with Anglo-Saxon and Germanic heritages. Through analysis of a broad range of sources, Daniel Gifford recreates the history of postcards to account for these specific audiences, and reconsiders the postcard phenomenon as an image-based conversation among exclusive groups of Americans. A variety of narratives are thus revealed: the debates generated by the Country Life Movement; the empowering manifestations of the New Woman; the civic privileges of whiteness; and the role of emerging technologies. From Santa Claus to Easter bunnies, flag-waving turkeys to gun-toting cupids, holiday postcards at first seem to be amusing expressions of a halcyon past. Yet with knowledge of audience and historical conflicts, this book demonstrates how the postcard images reveal deep divides at the height of the Progressive Era.

In this volume, Tanya Sheehan takes humor seriously in order to trace how photographic comedy was used in America and transnationally to express evolving ideas about race, black emancipation, and civil rights in the mid-1800s and into the twentieth century. Sheehan employs a trove of understudied materials to write a new history of photography, one that encompasses the rise of the commercial portrait studio in the 1840s, the popularization of amateur photography around 1900, and the mass circulation of postcards and other photographic ephemera in the twentieth century. She examines the racial politics that shaped some of the most essential elements of the medium, from the negative-positive process to the convention of the photographic smile. The book also places historical discourses in relation to contemporary art that critiques racism through humor, including the work of Genevieve Grieves, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson. By treating racial humor about and within the photographic medium as complex social commentary, rather than a collectible curiosity, Study in Black and White enriches our understanding of photography in popular culture. Transhistorical and interdisciplinary, this book will be of vital interest to scholars of art history and visual studies, critical race studies, U.S. history, and African American studies.

For many the postcard may seem trivial, little more than a mundane souvenir or a way to keep in touch with friends and relatives while on vacation. But if we look carefully, postcards offer valuable insights into the time periods in which they were created and the mentalities of those who bought or sent them. Frank Marhefka, while serving in the U.S. Army Motor Transportation Corps during the First World War, amassed a collection of more than 150 postcards and photographs while in France, and bound them into a souvenir album. Marhefka's collection provides a diverse and vivid look into a period of history that - in many soldiers' accounts - is not usually visualized with all its cruelties. Emphasizing the pictorial turn of the Great War, this album offers personal insight into a conflict that caused so much death and destruction. The book begins with an introduction providing a history of postcards and their extensive use by soldiers during the Great War. Then, after a biography of Marhefka, his postcard collection is presented in its entirety. Accompanying the images are brief texts that place them into historical context, as well as suggestions for further reading.As a visual artifact of the First World War and the perspective of one U.S. soldier, this book is aimed at students, scholars, postcard collectors, and general readers alike who have an interest in military history and popular culture.

A global exploration of postcards as artifacts at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. Postcards are usually associated with banal holiday pleasantries, but they are made possible by sophisticated industries and institutions, from printers to postal services. When they were invented, postcards established what is now taken for granted in modern times: the ability to send and receive messages around the world easily and inexpensively. Fundamentally they are about creating personal connections—links between people, places, and beliefs. Lydia Pyne examines postcards on a global scale, to understand them as artifacts that are at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. In doing so, she shows how postcards were the first global social network and also, here in the twenty-first century, how postcards are not yet extinct.

In the early twentieth century Hollywood was fascinated by the Far East. Chinese immigrants, however, were excluded since 1882 and racism pervaded U.S. society. When motion pictures became the most popular form of entertainment, immigration and race were heavily debated topics. 'Visualizing Orientalness' is the first book that analyses the significance of motion pictures within these discourses. Taking up approaches from the fields of visual culture studies and visual history, Björn A. Schmidt undertakes a visual discourse analysis of films from the 1910s to 1930s. The author shows how the visuality of films and the historical discourses and practices that surrounded them portrayed Chinese immigration and contributed to notions of Chinese Americans as a foreign and other race.

Since the late twentieth century, letters in literature have seen a remarkable renaissance. The prominence of letters in recent fiction is due in part to the rediscovery, by contemporary writers, of letters as an effective tool for rendering aspects of historicity, liminality, marginalization and the expression of subjectivity vis-à-vis an ‘other’; it is also due, however, to the artistically challenging inclusion of the new electronic media of communication into fiction. While studies of epistolary fiction have so far concentrated on the eighteenth century and on thematic concerns, this volume charts the epistolary renaissance in recent literature, entering new territory by also focusing on the aesthetic implications of the epistolary mode. In particular, the essays in this volume illuminate the potential of the epistolary (including digital forms) for rendering contemporary sensitivities. The volume thus offers a comprehensive assessment of letter narratives in contemporary literature. Through its focus on the aesthetic and structural aspects of new epistolary fiction, the inclusion of various narrative forms, and the consideration of both conventional letters and their new digital kindred, The Epistolary Renaissance offers novel insight into a multi-facetted (re)new(ed) genre.

Snapshots and Short Notes examines the photographic postcards exchanged during the first half of the twentieth century as illustrated, first-hand accounts of American life. Almost immediately after the introduction of the generic postcard at the turn of the century, innovations in small, accessible cameras added black and white photographs to the cards. The resulting combination of image and text emerged as a communication device tantamount to social media today. Postcard messages and photographs tell the stories of ordinary lives during a time of far-reaching technological, demographic, and social changes: a family’s new combine harvester that could cut 40 acres a day; a young woman trying to find work in a man’s world; the sight of an airplane in flight. However, postcards also chronicled and shared hardship and tragedy––the glaring reality of homesteading on the High Plains, natural disasters, preparations for war, and the struggles for racial and gender equality. With a meticulous eye for detail, painstaking research, and astute commentary, Wilson surveys more than 160 photographic postcards, reproduced in full color, that provide insights into every aspect of life in a time not far removed from our own.