Abstract:
This dissertation draws from the fields of history, art history, and visual culture to
generate a deeply contextualized analysis of early twentieth century holiday postcards. It
first argues that holiday postcards are significant cultural artifacts, overlooked by scholars
in favor of more familiar souvenir “view cards” of people and places. By contrast,
greeting cards—and holiday cards in particular—are a period-specific source with the
potential to represent a far more egalitarian and wide-reaching audience. This project
next offers an approach to quantitative history that reconstructs historical postcard
audiences by combining information gleaned from eBay.com with census records. After
quantitative analysis of 2,000 holiday postcards, it argues that these postcards circulated
primarily among rural and small town, Northern, white women with Anglo-Saxon and
Germanic heritages. Audiences and actual users are thus moved to the center of this
project, and extensive primary sources reconstruct the postcard phenomenon from their
perspective. This “bottom-up” approach reveals the ways in which postcards were
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appropriated by these particular groups, especially women. It is their interactions with
postcards that helped turn the medium into a major popular phenomenon in the early
1900s. Such postcard use is described as image-based conversations between these
specific audiences and networks of community and kin. The second half of the
dissertation then examines over 100 holiday images in the context of significant
contestations and tensions within these groups’ lives: the Country Life Movement; the
rise of the “New Woman”; and the influx of “new immigrants.” It looks at how these
historical contestations added contextual meanings to holiday images, and how those
images mediated and addressed a multitude of fears, desires, and understandings among
postcard audiences. The images studied cover a wide range of popular holiday themes—
Santa Claus and Easter bunnies; flag-waving turkeys and gun-toting cupids; Halloween
witches and New Years drunks. The dissertation describes the interplay between three
important categories of information: the specificity of audience demographics; a thorough
understanding of historical context; and consistent visual themes and tropes. Knowledge
of audience and context reveals the ways in which holiday postcards and their attendant
images engaged with historically-specific conflicts, tensions, anxieties, and contestations
in people’s lives.
