Introduction

Produced in association with Visible Knowledge Project

Over a century ago, Harper’s Weekly commented that advertisements were “a true mirror of life, a sort of fossil history from which the future chronicler, if all other historical monuments were to be lost, might fully and graphically rewrite the history of our time.” Few if any historians today would claim that they could compose a complete history of an era from its advertisements, but in recent years scholars have creatively probed advertisements for clues about the society and the business environment that produced them. The presence of many excellent online collections of advertisements provides learners as well as established scholars the opportunity to examine these sources in new ways. The experience can be tantalizing and frustrating, since advertisements don’t readily proclaim their intent or display the social and cultural context of their creation. Yet studying advertisements as historical sources can also be fascinating and revealing.

Most of us—avid consumers though we may be—pride ourselves on being able to “see through” advertisements. We can interpret this phrase in several ways. Most simply, we “see through” ads when we are oblivious to them—when we look right past them, as we do with most ads we encounter daily. Much of what advertising professionals do is aimed at “cutting through the clutter,” overcoming our propensity to ignore most ads. In another sense of “seeing through,” we dismiss ads because we judge them to be misleading or dishonest. As historians, however, we need to focus on ads and see or hear them. As Yogi Berra put it, “You can observe a lot by watching.”