Description
Early 20th century postcard art offers a number of lessons about the transformation of American urban geography and representations of place, says Jakle (geography, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). He includes reproductions of some 80 postcards depicting urban night scenes from 1900 to the 1970s (primarily from the first four decades) in his reflections about the transformation of the city nightscape, discussing the impacts of technological, economic, and social change. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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Featuring eighty-two vintage postcards published beginning at the turn of the century, Postcards of the Night traces American cultural life as it was transformed by industrial strength and shifting demographics. The nation increasingly was growing more educated, upwardly mobile, and urban, and the nighttime postcard popularized this modernism for ordinary consumption. Coalitions of city planners and urban developers, politicians and the media utilized the picture postcard to strategize the role of the individual in the rise of the city. It was the birth of leisure and of travel, the new tourist city to which the postcard needed forcefully to speak, in ways that were equal part artifice and art.
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