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AMFELLOWS  February 1998

AMFELLOWS February 1998

Subject:

A thank-you; and a good book

From:

BTally <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

American Memory Fellows <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 26 Feb 1998 15:26:08 -0500

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (102 lines)

Hi all,

First a big THANK YOU to Frances for a very thoughtful account of her info
literacy work with students. Can anyone else -- especially any library media
people -- share their strategies for engaging kids around these challenging
information skills?

Second: If you've enjoyed the wonderful Detroit Photo Collection, here's a
review of a new book about the photos, from a fascinating historian who is
obsessed with photos.  The review was emailed to me from Amazon.com, the online
book store.  Hope you like it.

Bill

                         ******

Dreamland: America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
by Michael Lesy

You can find this book and more at
http://www.amazon.com/art-and-architecture-2-1998

                         ******

Anyone who has flipped through a box of antique
postcards has undoubtedly seen a few haunting gems
by Detroit Publishing Company. The magnetism of the
images--the result of a combination of brilliant
photography and a special Swiss color-lithographic
method--is indefinable. They crystallize a distant past
that seems enviably ordered and serene.

Michael Lesy, author of the acclaimed "Wisconsin Death
Trip" and other books, is a historian who has spent
years poring over Detroit Company images in the Library
of Congress. For "Dreamland," he chose 208 of the
original black-and-white negatives--a minuscule
percentage of the 46,000 available. This selection
offers a tantalizing glimpse of a hopeful, peaceful
America at the turn of the 20th century.

Detroit photographers went everywhere. The famous
William Henry Jackson toured fabled national
glories--Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon--that only a
handful of Americans had seen. His pictures were used
to promote the construction of railroads to the West,
and they worked: the vast, varied landscape was
irresistibly alluring.

In cities, Detroit photographers shot rising
skyscrapers (15 stories!), busy harbors, fancy stores,
and streets filled with people going about their business.
The granite and marble monuments look progressive and
exciting, and the parks are elegant.

Lesy describes the times in sensitively crafted
essays. He points out, for example, that while only a
slender upper crust of Americans attended college, 90
percent of the citizenry was literate (compared to less
than 60 percent today). They read 2,000 daily papers in
English and 500 in 29 other languages. They were
workers, dreamers, schemers, travelers, and they
wrote postcards to one another wherever they went. For
vicarious travelers, Detroit published boxed sets of
images both familiar and new: the Wild West, the tamed
but teeming East, and everything in between.

Lesy also documents his own evolving perspective as
he suddenly realized that many of the old pictures
recorded the America his dying mother must have known
as a child. To him, and to us, these beautifully
composed photographs of steam locomotives, sprawling
gingerbread hotels, and women in white dresses are
documents of a lost era, quaint and curious. But to her
they were the real thing--not history, but life itself.

A caveat: "Dreamland" is printed on black pages. The
white type disappears, and even the numbers under the
pictures are hard to read. This is doubly burdensome
because the designer inexcusably relegated captions to
the back of the book. You have to flip back and forth
to find out that the city slickers out for a Sunday
stroll in plate 59 are in Chicago, completely unrelated
to the gents on the facing page, taking the air on a
New York City promenade.

And a quibble: For Detroit collectors, the photographs
may seem denuded, printed in the original
black-and-white instead of the richly colored,
lithographed dreamscapes they became in postcard
form. Their magical clarity is still mesmerizing,
but some readers will be left wanting more.


--Margaret Moorman is a contributing editor of ARTnews
magazine and the author of two memoirs, "My Sister's
Keeper" and "Waiting to Forget," and one children's
book, "Light the Lights!"


Copyright 1998 Amazon.com, Inc. All rights reserved.

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