Sunday, February 21st, 2:00pm, “Your Face is Like a Book: Reading the Images on Historic Postcards & Valentines” presented by Michelle A. Morgan, PhD candidate
On Sunday, February 21st at 2:00pm, Michelle A. Morgan, a PhD candidate in Visual and Material Culture at Yale, will be presenting excerpts from her Masters Thesis in an illustrated program entitled “Your Face is Like a Book: Reading the Images on Historic Postcards & Valentines”. In honor of Valentine’s Day and the Freeport Historical Society’s collection of historic valentines, join us for a discussion of love, affection, and desire as it played out on these nice (and often not-so-nice) “tokens” of history.
During the last decades of the nineteenth century and the earliest years of the twentieth century, visual images proliferated at a never-before-seen pace. Some of the most widely circulated and mass-produced images appeared on greeting cards and, at the turn of the century, on postcards. How do we “read” these images one hundred years (and more) after the fact? What can the images on historic greeting cards and postcards tell us about the people who used and commented on these images? Ms. Morgan will offer her take on how the images of the past constructed the social relationships of the time, suggesting that the motifs of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were uniquely situated within their historic moment, but were likewise not so different from contemporary sentiments.
$5.00 suggested donation.
FMI: www.freeporthistoricalsociety.org or call 865-3170
