Pastoral and Monumental: Dams, Postcards, and the American Landscape

Notes

PASTORAL AND MONUMENTAL 299 Chapter 1. Pastoral and Monumental 1. For one example among many, see Richard Gerstell, American Shad in the Susquehanna River Basin: A Three-Hundred-Year History (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998), 47–54. In Massachusetts, the Fifty-Third Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fisheries and Game for the Year Ending November 30, 1918 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1919), 173–78, included significant discussion of fishways in the state. Much attention was given to the lower Merrimack River and an 1865 photograph of the fishway at Lawrence Dam appears opposite page 168. 2. For more on the Hetch Hetchy controversy, see Holway R. Jones, John Muir and the Sierra Club: The Battle for Yosemite (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1965); Kendrick A. Clements, “Politics and the Park: San Francisco’s Fight for Hetch Hetchy, 1908–1913,” Pacific Historical Review 48 (1979): 185–215; and Robert Richter, The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 3. George Miller and Dorothy Miller, Picture Postcards in the United States, 1893–1918 (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1976), 22, 26. 4. Norman D. Stevens, ed., Postcards in the Library: Invaluable Visual Resources (New York: Haworth Press, 1995), frontispiece. The quotation is from Professor Bill Katz, School of Information Science and Policy, State University of New York/Albany. 5. Norman D. Stevens, “Welcome to the World of Postcards,” in Postcards in the Library, ed. Norman D. Stevens (New York: Haworth Press, 1995), 3. 6. Examples of generally descriptive postcard books include Gary L. Doster, From Abbeville to Zebulon: Early Post Card Views of Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Mary Norton Kratt and Mary Manning Boyer, Remembering Charlotte: Postcards from a New South City, 1905–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Luc Van Malderen, American Architecture: A Vintage Postcard Collection (New York: Images Publishing, 2000). For a book focused on postcards produced by one company, see J. L. Lowe and B. Papell, Detroit Publishing Company Collector’s Guide (Newton Square, PA: Deltiologists of America, 1975). 7. An example of such a theme-based postcard book is Roger Grant’s Railroad Postcards in the Age of Steam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994). 8. For example, see Christraud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb, Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998); James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Joanna C. Scherer, “The Photographic Document: Photographs as Primary Data in Anthropological Enquiry,” in Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 32–41; Joanna C. Scherer, “You Can’t Believe Your Eyes: Inaccuracies in Photographs of North American Indians,” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 2 (1975): 67–79. A similar type of analysis of images appearing within the popular journal National Geographic is available in Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Chapter Four NOTES Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan, and the way that postcards reflect the interests of the Japanese colonial regime, is analyzed in Paul D. Barclay, “Peddling Postcards and Selling Empire: Image-Making in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule,” Japanese Studies 30 (May 2010): 81–110. 9. Some readers might suspect that the very act of making postcards of dams was controlled by a few manufacturers possessed of an agenda to manipulate public opinion and perceptions, an agenda that (for some reason) sought to promote an acceptance of dam technology otherwise foreign to an unaware and gullible public. In response to such a possible critique, the author simply asks readers to consider evidence presented in chapter 2, which illustrates the diffused process of postcard production and the way distribution relied upon a wide range of participants from the retail level up. In this sense, the “postcard craze” of the early twentieth century represented the attributes of a popular culture in which the impetus for growth and expansion germinated within a broad-based sector of the American population . In contrast, it did not represent a mass-culture phenomena in which the actions (and reactions) of the public were largely guided and directed by a few institutions or corporations. As the years passed by, the novelty of postcards waned and their cultural import as a medium of communication evolved. And by the mid-twentieth century, postcard production had...