Postcards are an amazing source of historical documentation, chronicling people’s experiences and freezing a moment in time. Around 1900, nearly every trend, fashion statement, social issue or artistic style found expression on postcards.

The Newberry Library holds a vast collection of postcards, along with administrative records related to their production. In this exhibit, these cards will be used to explore four themes that span different eras:

Location

Postcards are one of the world’s great travelling objects, taking form as they traverse from sender to recipient via archives and exhibition spaces, flea markets and collector fairs, catalogues and books – among other places. Postcards alter and recontextualise photographic images both materially and discursively through this transitive movement.

Hansen notes that Curt Teich postcard company produced most of these images for various businesses in the 1910s and 1920s; such as those related to suffrage and temperance movements or overtly racist topics like Ku Klux Klan membership or lynchings. Hansen suggests this may have been done due to their commission from Black businesses during that era.

At their core, these postcards serve to demonstrate the power of local communities as sources of learning and teaching. They demonstrate how a community can inspire artists through art-making and collecting processes which can then be combined into tangible forms such as postcard books. ROADBOOK has commissioned ten artists from diverse locations to explore what the concept of journey means through illustration, photography and poetry for this limited-edition set.

Time

Early twentieth-century postcards were an extremely popular means of communication; some estimates place six billion postcards sent during the first two decades of this century alone! Such records offer valuable information that reveals social and cultural history from one time period to the next.

Postcards offer an opportunity to explore how individuals interpret their surroundings, with postcards used as classroom activities to examine how people make sense of events that occurred around them. Students could examine postcards that depict natural disasters, considering how these events were depicted on these cards, or write and reflect upon how postcards from other parts of the world connected them with them personally.

Postcards can also serve as an effective teaching aid for ethnographic fieldwork. Students can learn about how objects are given meaning through their movement across space and time, tracing back traces of global cultural connections as they travel between locations. Furthermore, postcards allow researchers to understand the value of collecting and preserving artifacts within a research context – for instance one student at Colorado college conducted research focusing on stereotypical postcards featuring Native Americans along Route 66.

Aesthetics

Many of us think of postcards as inexpensive souvenirs to send to family and close friends, but around 100 years ago when the Internet wasn’t even an idea and telephones were considered luxury products, postcards were an integral means of global communication.

Postcards serve a dual function: they showcase beautiful places while also conveying cultural information about them. [18] In this way, postcards play a pivotal role in driving tourism and stimulating local economies.

Postcards offer much more than aesthetic qualities; they also contain data such as printing styles, postal codes, dates, messages, documentary images, correspondence advertisements and ephemera which all contribute to our understanding of their historical contexts.

Once a picturesque image has been altered and inscribed with text, it becomes part of wider “cultures of circulation” (Goankar and Povinelli 2003). Thus postcards become traveling objects whose value and meaning change depending on where they go. This phenomenon becomes particularly apparent when they move beyond sender/recipient exchange to public institutions such as archives and exhibitions.

Networks

At the turn of the 20th Century, postcards were an increasingly popular means of communication with global neighbours and friends. Combining images and text in an easily personalised manner, postcards provided a more democratic form of global communications than carte de visites or cabinet cards (Ferguson 2005). Unfortunately, academic research on postcards often dismissed them as mere banal expressions of popular culture (Ferguson 2005).

Postcards offer more than visual images; they also allow us to trace global networks at the time of production by looking at links between producers and collectors as well as between a specific card and its recipient.

Postcards are traveling objects, often changing location along with their value and significance. Their migration patterns allow us to map connections among global cultures and reveal insights into the interplay of social and economic forces that shaped cultural exchange in early 20th-century culture. By studying their circulation across archives, exhibitions, flea markets collector fairs and online collections we can gain an insight into how postcards were utilized as learning and sharing tools.

Communication

Postcards are iconic traveling objects: their value can fluctuate as they make their rounds through archives and exhibitions, flea markets collector fairs, online databases and book collections, even after their relationship with one sender has concluded. Postcards provide us with a rich repository of cultural history that challenges the boundaries between production and consumption.

Homi Bhabha would later theorize that postcards of Indian servants mimicking the domestic habits of their European masters exemplify this form of mockery that Homi Bhabha would later analyze in The Location of Culture (1994). Yet these cards also represent hierarchies at the core of colonial relationships as well as European anxieties surrounding subversion of these hierarchies.

The collection at the Newberry shows how postcards can serve both as historical documents and research tools for global cultures around 1900. Postcards were an indispensable medium, blurring divisions between producer and consumer while creating local and global networks; opening photographs up for annotation, reconfiguration, and rework in global cultures of circulation. Therefore, exploring this archive offers an unparalleled opportunity to understand how global culture was constructed during early 20th century – both through postcard production itself as well as circulation networks.