Three-dimensional stereoviews were wildly popular in the mid-19th century. Yet public infatuation fueled highbrow scorn, and even when they fell from favor, critics retained their disdain. Thus a dazzling body of photographic work has unjustly been buried. This book explores how compelling images were made by carefully combining subject matter, composition, lighting, tonality, blocking and depth. It draws upon the fine arts, the mass media, humanities, history, and even geology. Throughout, overlooked photographers are celebrated, such as the one who found extraordinary visual parallels within nature, anticipating Cezanne and Seurat--or the one who refused to play favorites during a bitter war and found humanity on both sides--or the one who took a favorite American glen and found menace all about. Stereographers were actually more like film directors or television producers than large format photographers: the best ones fused artistry with commercial appeal.

Landscape in American Guides and View Books: Visual History of Touring and Travel is vested in the American relationship to landscape and the role guidebooks and view books played in touring and travel experiences, including immigration. Early in the history of the republic, the relationship to landscape turns visual, that is, landscapes inspire artistic responses in the form of written descriptions and visual representations. The predominant element is the scene. From the 1820s on scenic thinking, within an emerging industrial economy, characterizes a major cultural and social development. As immigration increases, within the country and from abroad, publishers and trade groups create souvenir guidebooks and view books to facilitate the movement of people, and to encourage economic expansion and tourism. Guide and view book analysis centers on pictures of landscape transformations and includes the cultural basis of scenes changing from pastoral and picturesque expressions to the documentation of managed views. The general acceptance of managed views as replacements for romantic ones illustrates a commitment to landscapes that denote utility and the influence of commercial and industrial urban centers on American life. Guidebook and view book imagery, composed of durable schemas, promotes visual thinking across social classes and time. The primary medium for souvenirs is the photograph, which printing methods, like photolithography, transform into printed products. The visual history of touring and travel is part of America's first visual culture, as well as the social formation of landscape, the emergence of a collective vision among souvenir producers and consumers, and the role visual information plays in landscape commentary, which is the literary context for printed souvenirs.

From the Great Depression through the early postwar years, any postcard sent in America was more than likely a “linen” card. Colorized in vivid, often exaggerated hues and printed on card stock embossed with a linen-like texture, linen postcards celebrated the American scene with views of majestic landscapes, modern cityscapes, roadside attractions, and other notable features. These colorful images portrayed the United States as shimmering with promise, quite unlike the black-and-white worlds of documentary photography or Life magazine. Linen postcards were enormously popular, with close to a billion printed and sold. Postcard America offers the first comprehensive study of these cards and their cultural significance. Drawing on the production files of Curt Teich & Co. of Chicago, the originator of linen postcards, Jeffrey L. Meikle reveals how photographic views were transformed into colorized postcard images, often by means of manipulation—adding and deleting details or collaging bits and pieces from several photos. He presents two extensive portfolios of postcards—landscapes and cityscapes—that comprise a representative iconography of linen postcard views. For each image, Meikle explains the postcard’s subject, describes aspects of its production, and places it in social and cultural contexts. In the concluding chapter, he shifts from historical interpretation to a contemporary viewpoint, considering nostalgia as a motive for collectors and others who are fascinated today by these striking images.

This overview of the "sister arts" of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. The volume offers fresh and sometimes extended discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of artistic and literary conventions and analyses of the economic, social, and technological forces that gave them shape and were influenced by them in turn. A wide range of figures are significantly reassessed, including the painters Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Mary Cassatt, and such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and William Dean Howells. One overarching theme to emerge is the development of an American national subjectivity as it interacted with the transformation of a culture dominated by religious values to one increasingly influenced by commercial imperatives. The essays probe the ways in which artists and writers responded to the changing conditions of the cultural milieu as it was mediated by such factors as class and gender, modes of perception and representation, and conflicting ideals and realities.

In this lavishly illustrated book, David Morgan surveys the visual culture that shaped American Protestantism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--a vast record of images in illustrated bibles, Christian almanacs, children's literature, popular religious books, charts, broadsides, Sunday school cards, illuminated devotional items, tracts, chromos, and engravings. His purpose is to explain the rise of these images, their appearance and subject matter, how they were understood by believers, the uses to which they were put, and what their relation was to technological innovations, commerce, and the cultural politics of Protestantism. His overarching argument is that the role of images in American Protestantism greatly expanded and developed during this period.

Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In American Archives Shawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like--or "should" look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle-class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as well as literary, scientific, and popular texts, enable her to demonstrate how new visual paradigms posed bodily appearance as an index to interior "essence." Ultimately we see how competing preoccupations over gender, class, race, and American identity were played out in the making of a wide range of popular and institutional photographs. Smith demonstrates that as the body was variously mapped and defined as the key to essentialized identities, the image of the white middle-class woman was often held up as the most complete American ideal. She begins by studying gendered images of middle-class domesticity to expose a transformation of feminine architectures of interiority into the "essences" of "blood," "character," and "race." She reads visual documents, as well as literary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pauline Hopkins, and Theodore Dreiser, as both indices of and forms of resistance to dominant images of gender, class, race, and national identity. Through this analysis Smith shows how the white male gaze that sought to define and constrain white women and people of color was contested and transformed over the course of the nineteenth century. Smith identifies nineteenth-century visual paradigms that continue to shape debates about the terms of American belonging today. American Archives contributes significantly to the growing field of American visual cultural studies, and it is unprecedented in explaining how practices of racialized looking and the parameters of "American looks" were established in the first place.