Postcards of the Night: Views of American Cities

Featuring eighty-two vintage postcards published beginning at the turn of the century, Postcards of the Night traces American cultural life as it was transformed by industrial strength and shifting demographics. The nation increasingly was growing more educated, upwardly mobile, and urban, and the nighttime postcard popularized this modernism for ordinary consumption. Coalitions of city planners and urban developers, politicians and the media utilized the picture postcard to strategize the role of the individual in the rise of the city. It was the birth of leisure and of travel, the new tourist city to which the postcard needed forcefully to speak, in ways that were equal part artifice and art.