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Time Travel to Make Jack Finney Proud
When was the last time your imagination was truly stirred by a picture postcard? Most of us do a quick flip to the text on the back, giving the photo on the front but a cursory glance. And who can blame us? After all, we've seen, if not experienced firsthand, much of the world's vast beauty and majesty on television, in movies, and on the glossy pages of magazines. What's one more generic shot of a skyscraper or the sun setting on a tropical beach?
There was a time, though, when a picture postcard truly had the power to transport, when one's first view of the Brooklyn Bridge, say, or Utah's Great Salt Lake or Niagara Falls might truly take one's breath away.
Of such power is Michael Lesy's new book, DREAMLAND: AMERICA AT THE DAWN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Perhaps never was a book more aptly titled, for this volume truly invokes in the reader a dreamlike state. Like a clothbound time machine, DREAMLAND whisks us back to an era that lies just out of memory's reach: the dawning of the American century.
The book's images are the work of a team of photographers who were supervised by William Henry Jackson, a prominent landscape photographer of his day. Jackson was engaged by Detroit Publishing, a postcard publishing house, to capture the changing face of the nation. Their investment certainly paid off: Detroit Publishing sold upward of seven million images a year from this collection.
When Detroit Publishing folded in 1924, the collection was deposited in the Library of Congress where it languished until photo historian Michael Lesy selected 208 of the images for inclusion in this volume. These evocative images recall a turn-of-the-century America in which:
- Only 40% percent of American lived in cities and towns, while 60% resided in the countryside, in tiny villages and on farms.
- New York City had a population of 3.4 million, less than half the current figure, while Los Angeles was home to only 103,000 people.
- The life expectancy of a white man was 46 years, white women, 48. Non-whites had an average life expectancy of only 33. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, and flu were the greatest killers of the age.
Savor these examples of the wonderfully evocative images offered in DREAMLAND. Allow them to transport you to an earlier time, an age when your parents, grandparents, or perhaps even great-grandparents were but children, when New York City's just completed Flatiron building was, at 20 stories, the tallest in the world, when Cy Young pitched the first major-league no-hitter. An hour spent in DREAMLAND is as fine an escape from the rat race as one could ask for.
This review originally appeared at BarnesandNoble.com
