Before the turn of this new century, the world was gripped with pre-millennial "madness," fearing the Y2K bug and a God- or human-initiated apocalypse.

At the turn of the 19th century, the world experienced a decidedly different mania: people went crazy over postcards.

From 1890 to 1914, people from all walks of life were obsessed with buying, sending and collecting postcards. Any subject was fodder for them. A collector could purchase a postcard commemorating a tuberculosis conference, the construction of the Panama Canal, or the majestic Rockies at the new Banff National Park.

Dr. Mark Simpson, a U of A English professor specializing in cultural theory, identifies three possible impetuses for the craze. During the late 19th century, innovations in photography and printing made creating and replicating images on paper relatively easy. After their invention in the 1860s, postcards were government-issued and subject to intense regulation, so that initially a postcard cost the ordinary person more trouble and money to send than a letter. In the 1890s, however, changes in postal policy allowed people to mail postcards cheaply and to produce their own cards. Finally, travel became accessible to a broader range and to a larger number of tourists, all of whom found the postcard an irresistible souvenir. The last decade of the 19th century also witnessed a great wave of immigration from Europe to North America. These new arrivals brought the practice of sending postcards - a European habit - to the New World.

Simpson is particularly intrigued by how the middle- and upper-brow media depicted the postcard rage. According to these critics, the image-based postcard threatened the art of letter-writing. In this view, the habit of dashing off casual and clich‚d phrases on the backs of postcards would eventually lead to the deterioration of verbal expression and, by extension, literacy itself. (Sound familiar?)

Dr. Mark Simpson explores the late-19th century postcard craze and its association with cultural illness.

One way this concern was expressed, says Simpson, was through a "discourse of disease." For example, in 1906 John Walter Harrington wrote an article in American Illustrated Magazine called "Postal Carditis and Some Allied Manias." Writers such as Harrington believed postcards threatened the "health" of high culture by debasing compositional skills. Combined with this fear was the belief the vogue was brought to America by immigrants and foreigners, who in other contexts were routinely accused of being unhygienic - promoters of filth and carriers of disease. Thus Harrington could write "the microbe postale universelle" was "brought to this country in the baggage of tourists and immigrants" and resulted in an epidemic "faddy degeneration of the brain."

March 17, 2000

In this respect, Simpson finds Banff National Park an intriguing locus of investigation. Banff was a popular tourist destination whose scenery appeared on many a postcard; Banff was also a health spa. Simpson intends to explore this collision of ideas about physical health with the postcard's association with cultural illness. To do so, Simpson will trace the presence of postcards in Chicago during the 1893 World's Fair, Ellis Island in 1900, and San Francisco during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

For Simpson, obtaining postcards, the raw materials of his research, has proven difficult. "It's kind of frustrating-the archive isn't organized like I would organize it." Furthermore, most postcards he encounters in archives don't have written messages. For his work, Simpson needs used postcards to understand popular culture. "You need to know how people used it." He will visit archives throughout North America to complete his research, but he says to find postcards with writing on them, "I'll have to go to some flea markets."

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