Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco

Abstract

Amy K. DeFalco Lippert's Consuming Identities charts the growth of the image industry in San Francisco from the gold rush to the beginning of the twentieth century. San Francisco functions not as a case study for the defining role of visual images in the rapidly expanding and industrializing nation but as a pivotal center for such developments. The text draws from an array of visual culture sources—photographs, lithographs, newspaper illustrations, sheet music, scrapbooks—and archival materials to construct a narrative that addresses such divergent topics as the gold rush, pornography, celebrity culture, vigilantism, racialized stereotypes, postmortem imagery, criminology, surveillance, and homesickness. Such breadth attests to the author's ability to draw together a wide swath of material, yet it also carries the memory of the manuscript's original incarnation as a doctoral dissertation. At the same time, breadth creates a somewhat-convoluted narrative that reads less like a coherent argument and more like a series of interesting vignettes.