Exchange Cards: Advertising, Album Making, and the Commodification of Sentiment in the Gilded Age

Abstract

This article examines the materiality of advertising trade cards used in the Gilded Age United States and resituates the medium within the post–Civil War culture of sentimental and personal exchange. Mobilizing evidence from over 3,000 cards and numerous scrapbooks, this article demonstrates that market culture commodified sentimental images and themes in chromolithographed cards, enabling consumers to appropriate them for sentimental expression in albums. The function and usage patterns of such cards as album keepsakes thus illustrates an underlying tension in the nineteenth-century ideals of separate spheres and sincere expression.