DISPLAY OF WWI PROPAGANDA FOR MIAMI DADE COLLEGE STUDENTS

This Friday, Sandra Castillo and twenty of her Miami Dade College students came to the Wolfsonian-FIU for a lecture presentation on the subject of World War I propaganda. Although the Wolfsonian has gained notoriety as a “must see” repository of materials documenting the Second World War, we also have a very strong collection of rare books, periodicals, and ephemera dating back to the earlier conflict.

When asked to consider how wars were won (or lost), most of the students immediately responded with lists of the obvious determinants: powerful armies, warships, airships, and tanks; the production and supply of war munitions; strategic battle plans and victories; manpower and the attrition of the enemy. The impact of propaganda on the morale of enemy and friendly soldiers at the front, and civilians on the home front, and the court of world opinion did not immediately register with the students as something of vital importance to the combatants. After looking over some of the propaganda materials laid out on the main reading room tables, however, many of the students began to understand that it wasn’t only material considerations that impacted a country’s ability to maintain the fighting spirit also necessary for prosecuting a long and bloody conflict over the course of several years.

The professor and her students were treated to a wide variety of propaganda materials produced by all of the protagonists participating in the Great War. Highlights included The great war victory album and The century edition de luxe of Raemaekers' war cartoons; two recruiting posters aimed at an African American audience; postcards from Italy, France, and the United States aimed at lifting morale on the home front by lampooning the enemy; song books and sheet music covers designed to inspire patriotism and faith in final victory.

Among the items that proved most popular with the students were those books ostensibly written for children, but also designed to win over parental readers and an adult audience. Although our collection originally included a fair number of rare propaganda books designed for a juvenile audience, our holdings were dramatically augmented thanks to a generous donation by Pamela K. Harer in 2007 of more than one hundred children’s propaganda books from the First and Second World Wars. Several of the latter books have been included here, and others displayed in an earlier exhibition can be accessed by clicking on the title of the blog.

VISIT BY FIU ARCHITECTURE FACULTY AND STUDENTS

Earlier this week, thirty-three students from Florida International University’s School of Architecture came to the Wolfsonian museum and library for a tour of the facilities and a look at some of the 11,000 vintage postcards in our collection. Professors Claudia Busch, Eric Peterson, and Michelle Cintron brought their students over to the beach so that they could get an idea of exactly what would be involved in designing a museum that would have to house and exhibit a large postcard collection. After their tour of the gallery spaces, the students came down to the main reading room of our special collections and rare books library to view some of the more unusual postcards in our collection and to listen to and participate in a discussion about some of the less obvious environmental, storage, lighting, and other considerations that would be involved in designing a museum exclusively devoted to preserving and exhibiting vintage postcards in the subtropics. One important preservation and access idea that proved popular was the idea of digitizing and projecting images of postcards on the gallery walls to avoid exposing the fragile originals to damaging UV light. Since postcards were originally designed for travel, one of the professors suggested the possibility of creating a non-static display in which images of postcards might zip around the gallery spaces as if they were flying through post office sorting machines. All of us here at the Wolfsonian look forward to the students’ future research visits this semester and to seeing the final projects dreamed up by these budding architects.

Here are a couple of the more unsual poscards (made of leather and wood) seen by this group:

FIU ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS TO CONTEMPLATE A POSTCARD MUSEUM

This Tuesday we had a visit in the library by Claudia Busch, Eric Peterson, and Michelle Cintron from the School of Architecture at Florida International University. Professor Busch and her colleagues will be teaching a class for second year architecture students this coming Spring semester. Students taking this class will be designing plans for a small museum dedicated exclusively to the postcard. With well over 11,000 postcards in our library collection, the professors visited our library to determine some of the important environmental, security, storage, lighting, presentation, visitation, and exhibition concepts that their students ought to be considering in their plans. Some of the topics discussed at the meeting included the types of shelving and storage best suited to housing and facilitating retrieval of such a collection; whether this museum would need to accommodate visits by the general public and large groups of school children; and whether there ought to be a separate section or area with study carrels or offices for visiting researchers or residential scholars. Other considerations brought up by Wolfsonian curator Sarah Schleuning included ideas related to optimal viewing, weighing in on the pluses and minuses of natural and artificial lighting treatments. And, of course, when contemplating a site on South Beach, what ought student architects be thinking in terms of protecting the collection from undue light exposure, flooding, and tropical rain and windstorms.

While we have not yet ever mounted an exhibition devoted solely to the postcard, we do regularly integrate them into our public galleries and especially in our own library displays. Because of their relatively small and standard shapes, postcard exhibitions pose some particularly difficult problems for display. To avoid monotonous exhibits, a postcard museum might want to make use of narrow gallery spaces where the items do not get lost. Alternatively, the student architects might want to take advantage of the new technologies of digital capture and projection to create environments where the postcards could be presented to the public virtually in any variety of scales and sizes. Whatever choices these students ultimately make, we can be sure that a visit to the Wolfsonian’s facility and collection will serve to inspire them with the postcards' possibilities. Here are just a few of the postcards that these professors had a chance to see.