UPCOMING CONFERENCE - 2011
Before Madison Avenue:
Advertising in Early AmericaA conference sponsored by the Center for Historic American Visual Culture and the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture at the American Antiquarian Society
November 4-5, 2011
Advertising is everywhere in contemporary America, both as form and practice. Billboards line our highways, Internet ads are tailored to suit our every search, and "Mad Men" cleans up during award season. Advertising is one of the key elements of modern corporate capitalism, and its terms—branding, packaging, the hard sell—pervade our language. Advertising promotes familiar brands, introduces new technologies, and seeks to encourage the consumer spending that has become the cornerstone of the American economy.
But advertising is not an invention of the twentieth century. Rather, appeals to consumers saturated the media of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America, and in fact served to make those media possible. From newspapers to trade cards to broadsides to posters, ads were everywhere in early America, helping to support the rise of entire sectors of the publishing industry and introducing Americans to the ever-expanding world of goods and services that the growing nation offered. But what were the aesthetics, conventions, norms, and business practices of advertising in early America? How did individuals and businesses make sense of the constantly changing media that were available to them, and how did early American consumers respond to printed, spoken, or illustrated inducements to buy? How did what is now both an established business practice and an omnipresent cultural form take shape? Who were the Don Drapers, Betty Crockers, and Jolly Green Giants of previous centuries?
This conference will offer an interdisciplinary look at the history of advertising in America through an examination of multiple industries, media forms, and historical periods. Scholars will address the rise of modern consumer culture, the creation of consumers, marketing authority and celebrity, advertising the natural world, and the intersection of words and images in advertising. Genres of print and artifacts to be addressed include Bibles, gift books, newspaper images, prints, patent medicines, circus posters, daguerreotypes, photographs, and sensational advertisements. The Library Company of Philadelphia will be hosting additional sessions on March 15 and 16.
~ Schedule ~
Friday Afternoon
2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Marketing Books and Print Culture
(Upstairs lounge, Goddard-Daniels House)
Moderated by Robert A. Gross, University of Connecticut
- Seth Perry, PhD Candidate, University of Chicago Divinity School, How to Sell a Bible: Advertising and Authority in America, 1770-1850
- Robb Haberman, Colby College: The Periodical as advertiser: The Massachusetts Magazine and the Post-Revolutionary Book Trade
- David Dowling: Advertising the New York Ledger: The Aesthetics of Robert Bonner's Literary Capitalism
- Kristin Doyle Highland, PhD candidate, New York University: Risky Business: The Great Gift Book Enterprise in Nineteenth-Century Bookselling
4:30 - 5:30 p.m.
Opening Remarks and Keynote Address
(Antiquarian Hall)Wendy Woloson, Independent Scholar: Early American Persuasion and the Emergence of Modern Consumer Culture
Reception, Goddard Daniels House, 190 Salisbury Street
Saturday Morning
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Salisbury Labs9 - 10:30 a.m.
Creating Consumers
- Emma Hart, University of St. Andrews: The Colonial Newspaper Advertisement and the Shifting Geography of the Early American Marketplace
- Carl Keyes and Marybeth Mulligan, Assumption College: Cultivating the City Consumer: Marketing Books and Prints in the Revolutionary Era and the New Nation
- Eric Gardner, Saginaw Valley State University: "We refer our readers:" Black Transformations and Advertising in the Christian Recorder
11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Marketing Authority and Celebrity
- Robert Olwell, University of Texas, Austin: The Eye of the Beholder: advertising, Promotion, and Self-Fashioning in the Peripatetic Career of a Mid-eighteenth-century "Oculist" and Colonial Author
- Patricia Tarantello, Fordham University: Advertising Image: Samuel Keimer's Unsuccessful Public Persona
- Jennifer Black, University of Southern California: To Trust the Word of Another: Testimonials and Expertise in Patent-Medicine Advertising
1:30 - 3 p.m.
Advertising the Natural World
- Brett Mizelle, California State University, Long Beach: The Production, Reception, and Cultural Work of Early Circus and Menagerie Advertising
- Richard Flint, Independent Scholar: Printing, Advertising, and Showmanship:How the Circus Came to Town
- Marina Moskowitz, University of Glasgow: Broadcasting Seeds on the American Landscape
3:30 p.m. - 5 p.m.
Words and Images
- Mazie Harris, PhD candidate, Brown University: Photographic Currency: Making Money in Nineteenth-Century Photography Studios
- Marcy J. Dinius, DePaul University: Love at First Sight or First Read? Using Fiction to Sell Daguerreotypy
- Hugh McIntosh, PhD candidate, Northwestern University: Victorian Viral: "Sensation" Advertising in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America
There will be breaks between each session.
