American Holiday Postcards, 1905-1915: Imagery and Context DanielGifford. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.

Abstract

American Holiday Postcards, 1905-1915: Imagery and Context Daniel Gifford. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.Holidays as pop culture offer a rich opportunity for libraries and other public institutions to display their collection of postcards, and the author notes in his introduction that there are multiple repositories with holiday postcards.The author, who works at the Smithsonian Institution and serves as a part-time faculty member in the Department of History and Art History, George Mason University, argues that holiday postcards circulated primarily among rural and small towns and Northern white women with Anglo-Saxon and Germanic heritages. Gifford reconsiders the postcard phenomenon as an image-based conversation among exclusive groups of Americans. From Santa Claus to Easter bunnies, flag-waving turkeys to gun-toting cupids, holiday postcards proved to be not only humorous expressions of a past era but a barometer to the deep divides within the American social fabric at the height of the Progressive Era.Gifford focuses on one period only, 1905-1915, when the makeup of the United States population was changing and postcards started to reflect a more urban design. This was actually considered the Golden Age of American postcards, which peaked in 1910 with the introduction of tariffs on German-printed postcards, and ended by 1915, when World War I ultimately disrupted the printing and import of the fine Germanprinted cards with their scenic landscapes.In fact, one of the most interesting chapters in the book is Chapter 5 (Women and Courtship in Holiday Postcards) which brings together three distinct elements: women as a core postcard audience; the historically situated contexts of the New Woman; and clusters of postcard images reflecting courtship in which stereotypes abound. This chapter argues that women in the early twentieth century used postcards to advance a gender-specific agenda on courtship as Christmas and Halloween joined Valentine's Day in displays of adult, heterosexual rites. Postcards allowed women to exploit holidays to control the power structures around them.Stereotypes abound, especially in portrayals of ethnic groups which often inspired protest movements. One such postcard, issued for St. Patrick's Day, shows two men shaking hands; one of the men wears a button from the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a group that organized such protests (68).Blacks were especially ill-served on postcards of these periods. Two for Thanksgiving are both quite derogatory. One portrays an African American woman as poor and rural, performing the hard labor of plucking a turkey that her white sisters have left behind (54). The second depicts the modern white woman (this was 1912! …