Thesis Prospectus

Background

My interest in iconographic commercial imagery can be traced back to a document I found while working as an archivist for the Tacoma Northwest Room in 2022, processing the materials of Puget Sound historian Murray Morgan. Amongst the drafts of his work, research materials, correspondence and historical photographs was an uncredited, undated catalog of log brands, corporate imagery that served the same purpose as animal branding, a stamp of ownership to deter or prosecute any potential thieves who may emerge in the timber’s path between the forest and the sawmill. There was something very interesting I found in these icons, designed to be “read” by two specific groups: employees within the timber company and people who intended to steal from them, while remaining utterly innocuous to the general public.

Since then, I’ve become interested in the progression of early commercial imagery such as advertising, logos, packaging and branding, in relation to the development of printing technology. Particularly, I’m interested in the advent of what some historians call the “new advertising” movement around 1900, when imagery ceased becoming ornate and referential to the founders or their factories in a “signatory style” one might associate with stationary letterheads. Instead, commercial imagery simplified and became iconographic, like the timber brands, into what historian Jennifer M. Black calls “a logo-based language, a hieroglyphic set of graphic signifiers”. Historian Roland Marchand contended these simplified images “aroused less psychological resistance” and played into advertiser’s belief that “the eye gets the facts quicker and more graphically than the mind.”

Research Question

How did the iconographic turn in American commercial imagery reflect broader cultural, economic, and political transformations in the Inland Empire? I would also like to use this project to explore ways in which this iconographic turn also involved brand permanence in favor of consumer interactivity. Many of the most successful forms of advertisement before 1900, such as trade cards and wholesale sacks could be reinterpreted and recontextualized by their consumers in scrapbooks, as wall hanging designs and turned into clothing. In contrast, this new symbolic design movement thrived on being recognizable regardless of how it is physically manipulated.

Supporting this question, I am interested in exploring the ways in which the power of this advertising development has to do with the way these commercial images could be “read” by the consumer unconsciously, in the corner of a newspaper page or across the street on a billboard. Finally, I am interested in exploring the ways that commercial imagery and commerce at this time echoes our current economic and political landscape regarding popular anxiety around monopoly, government regulation and intentional confusion between propaganda, commercial imagery and educational materials.

Project Outline and Reasoning

To engage with these questions, I am proposing a public-facing digital project on the social influences that shaped commercial imagery in the Inland Empire from the gilded age through the progressive era. In the digital exhibit, I am envisioning one section that is a 20-25 page text portion that fulfills the graduate student handbook requirement for a seminar-length paper. This section will provide the reader with my thesis, literature review, methodology, and findings. On another portion of the site I am considering a map where selecting a node would allow visitors to examine a carousel of the artifact, the company and founders which could be expanded to a full screen light box, the object’s provenance and chronological metadata and a timeline of the company’s life span that can be toggled to contrast this with significant regional and national events. All this is in effort to convey the ideas put forth in the thesis interactively and give readers a better sense of these objects in time and space.

So why this period, region and focus and why am I approaching this as a digital public history project as opposed to a traditional thesis? I believe that examining commercial imagery from the gilded age through the progressive era is a culturally insightful 40 year window. Some of the first materials that we would recognize as modern advertising emerged during this time, well before the concept of “branding” and public relations. Being mindful to avoid projecting yourself onto how the audience received these materials, a historian can make new connections into how the producer wanted their product to be received by a local and international audience, who they were marketing to and the “problem” that their product solved for that consumer–in relation to social and economic events. Additionally, despite the incredible influence of advertising and public relations on American culture, historical analysis of these materials remains critically under researched in the academic landscape, particularly outside of New York and Chicago agencies.

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Regarding geographic focus on the Inland Empire, the area is uniquely well suited to this study as a somewhat isolated agricultural and industrial ecosystem that may speak more directly to regional events and trends and yield more concise findings than a broader area of focus. I am also interested in the region of the Inland Empire and Spokane specifically being somewhat similar to Tacoma during this time period, as a contender for industrial supremacy in Washington state that was ultimately defeated by Seattle, with similar themes of overbuilding followed by a long tail of recession. It’s possible that it may be easier to isolate iconographic trends from these sparser, “boom and bust” commercial landscapes. Critically, I find Spokane a unique subject area because its time frame of development and recession almost exactly map onto the formation of the advertising industry in the United States. Additionally, there may be interesting findings in the Dutch financiers that fueled these developments and whether they were transposing commercial imagery from New York onto this aspirational metropolis.*

I am also interested in studying the Inland Empire because of the extremely relevant holdings of the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture in Spokane. I can tell you firsthand that archivists are generally averse to housing artifacts of any kind, especially if they fall anywhere below the “historical significance” of high art. In contrast, the museum’s Joel E. Ferris Research Archives houses an incredibly unique collection of commercial and folk objects. These range from quilts, commercial poster art, wholesale and retail packaging, commercial ephemera and an extensive selection of flour sacks from Inland Empire mills that initially led me to research the institution.

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Because of the visual and comparative nature of this thesis, I believe a public history digital exhibit for this material would not only be the most compelling format but also the most pedagogically intuitive. Instead of working with a traditional text thesis, readers will be able to view the objects from multiple angles and engage with high definition close ups of the material, which is vital to understanding the printing and packaging technology used in their creation and how they physically persisted or degraded over time. Additionally, the visualization section of the site will allow readers to contrast and compare materials along with their associated metadata to engage with my findings interactively. While I don’t want to take up too much space on the technical aspects of this project, I am happy to discuss my experience creating digital collections and digital scholarship exhibits for faculty and fellowship recipients, and the work we put into ensuring the preservation of these digital projects at the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning at the U of I library.

Regarding who would benefit from this scholarship, I want to design the project so a diverse audience can engage with it. Academics in advertising and material history will have the knowledge base to use the text portion of the site, while informal historians, archaeologists or even high school teachers and undergraduate professors could use the visualization portion of the exhibit as a dynamic pedagogical tool. In short, the text portion of the site will be complementary to the visualization rather than required to understand it. Additionally, the work will provide the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture with hundreds of high-resolution photographs of undigitized portions of their collections and the site can be a showcase for innovative approaches at University of Idaho that are still rooted in traditional historical discipline.

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Finally, I believe that this era of industrialization, monopolization of wealth and the development of the advertising industry to avoid government regulation, boycotts and labor strikes have uncanny parallels to our current economic and political reality. I find it interesting how the dizzying, unnatural feeling of our current social and information landscape is also frequently cited by historians describing reactions to technology during this late period of industrialization. Related to advertising, there are also parallels in our popular challenges to differentiate between propaganda, advertising and educational material that can be explored through these objects.

Historiographical Overview

Methodologically, I am interested in approaching this project employing material history and structuralist approaches. Gunn and Faire’s Research Methods for History and Gerritsen and Riello’s Writing Material Culture History have been instructive overviews of the origins of material culture, it’s roots in archaeology and art history as well as its usefulness in reaching across disciplines to form new connections through quantitative approaches that I will be implementing in this project.

While certainly more associated with environmental history, William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West is very influential to this project in its structuralist approach to understand the interconnectedness and interdependence of the development of trades in the formation of Chicago and the subsequent development of commercial imagery that supported that growth. Cronon creates a compelling portrait of how train, vehicle, radio and telephone technology “annihilated space,” in the words of an early AT&T campaign, abstracting previous notions of commerce. The void this created between producer and consumer was filled with symbolic imagery in the form of newspaper ads, posters and catalogs, becoming a symbolic signature, a handshake or tour of the factory. Cronon concludes Nature’s Metropolis with the final abstraction of commerce during this period: the mail order catalog, where illustrations of previously unknown commodities created and stoked class anxieties and ascended to collective wish images, resources that I also plan on utilizing in this work.

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Roland Marchand’s, Advertising the American Dream and Creating the Corporate Soul also inform the way I will avoid speculating on how commercial imagery was received by consumers by remaining producer focused and backing up historical arguments with a diverse pool of multidisciplinary quantitative data. In both texts, Marchand contrasts commercial imagery against broader social and economic forces to tease out cultural and psychological findings and being mindful to not reach for a one to one cause and effect between advertising and social reaction to those images. Instead, Marchand developed the theory of Zerrspiegel, or distorting (funhouse) mirror, where the “elite provincial” values of urban, upper middle class admen are reflected out onto the public consciousness. Employing this approach, I am also mindful to avoid speculation and projection inherent to studying visual resources by focusing on the producer’s output and corporate legacy rather than the consumer’s hypothetical reaction to these materials.

Additionally, Pamela Walker Laird’s Advertising Progress and Daniel Robert’s Courteous Capitalism have been instrumental to my understanding the advent of the public relations industry, its origins in avoiding government regulation and deflecting criticism from the consuming public. M.M. Manring’s Slave in a Box, Bonnie Christensen’s Red Lodge and the Mythic West and Jennifer M. Black’s Branding Trust have been guiding works in how historians can make new connections by examining contemporaneous trends in commercial imagery, cultural anxieties and advancements in the printing and packaging technology of these materials.

Chapter Overview

Topics on the written portion of the site will likely begin with an overview of the industrialization of the Inland Empire area, its corporate leaders, financiers and a profile of the people that made up its workforce. From there, I will branch off into the technology that created the commercial imagery, the changing nature of packaging in relation to retail spaces in Spokane and the Inland Empire. Once that foundation is laid, I can discuss my methodologies for this research project and my findings on what insights are revealed in analyzing this pool of resources.

I’m envisioning the mapping portion of this digital project would be all of the items discussed in the text section and many more, assigned with locational, chronological and descriptive metadata, as well as summarized biographies of their founders and the success or failure of the business. I am also considering ways to complement this visualization with a timeline of significant cultural and economic events, to see how they are in conversation with the geography.

Sources

I will be conducting a research trip in May 2025 where I will be digitizing selected materials through scanning or photography at the Joel E. Ferris Research Archives. I have been in conversation with curator Ellen Postlewait to confirm scope, potential collections and ability to digitize materials and make them publicly available for this work. On that same trip, contextual research in other archives such as The Inland Northwest Special Collections, the Eastern Regional Branch of the Washington State Archives, Foley Center Library at Gonzaga University or early commercial sites in and around Spokane to supplement visual materials with historical documentation.

Once I return, I will enrich these images with metadata and build out my thesis using documents in our special collections as well as online historic newspaper databases. I will build the site on some variation of a CollectionBuilder template, in a static web generated GitHub platform which can easily be exported and moved to another host if needed.

Research and Writing Work Plan

February 2025: Meeting with Ellen Postlewait to discuss scope, potential collections and ability to digitize collections and make them publicly available for this project.
April 2025: Remote research to pare down which areas of the archive to digitize. May-June 2025: Digitization of selected materials through scanning or photography at the Joel E. Ferris Research archive located in the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture.
July-August 2025: Process visual resources. Build out metadata
September-December 2025: Gather supplemental resources. Wireframe potential site structures. Write the text portion and develop visualization with quantitative data.
January-May 2026: QC and edit down to final form

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References

Bennett, Lyn Ellen, and Scott Abbott. “Barbed and Dangerous: Constructing the Meaning of Barbed Wire in Late Nineteenth-Century America.” Agricultural History 88, no. 4 (September 1, 2014): 566–90.
Black, Jennifer M. “Exchange Cards: Advertising, Album Making, and the Commodification of Sentiment in the Gilded Age.” Winterthur Portfolio 51, no. 1 (March 2017): 1–53.
Black, Jennifer M. Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America. American Business, Politics, and Society. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024.
Christensen, Bonnie. Red Lodge and the Mythic West: Coal Miners to Cowboys. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002.
Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Norton Paperback. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992.
Fahey, John. The Inland Empire: Unfolding Years, 1879–1929. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986.
Finnegan, Margaret. Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture & Votes for Women. Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Gerritsen, Anne, and Giorgio Riello. Writing Material Culture History. Second edition. Writing History. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
Gunn, Simon, and Lucy Faire. Research Methods for History. Research Methods for the Arts and Humanities. Edinburgh: University Press, 2012.
Laird, Pamela Walker. Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. Studies in Industry and Society. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Manring, M. M. Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. The American South Series. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998.
Manning, Paul. “The Semiotics of Brand.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39, no. 1 (October 21, 2010): 33–49.
Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream (B): Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley (Calif.): University of California Press, 1986.
Marchand, Roland. Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Minnesota Letterheads: The Evolution of Business Style, 2024.
Mullins, Paul R. “Race and the Genteel Consumer: Class and African-American Consumption, 1850–1930.” Historical Archaeology 33, no. 1 (March 1999): 22–38.
Osmond, Gary. “‘Modest Monuments’?: Postage Stamps, Duke Kahanamoku and Hierarchies of Social Memory.” The Journal of Pacific History 43, no. 3 (December 2008): 313–29.
Pass, Forrest D. “Strange Whims of Crest Fiends: Marketing Heraldry in the United States, 1880–1980.” Journal of American Studies 50, no. 3 (August 2016): 587–611.
Raucher, Alan R. Public Relations and Business, 1900–1929. Johns Hopkins University. Studies in Historical and Political Science; Ser. 86, No. 2. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968.
Robert, Daniel. Courteous Capitalism: Public Relations and the Monopoly Problem, 1900–1930. Hagley Library Studies in Business, Technology, and Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023.
Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies. Routledge, 2019.
St. John, Burton, Margot Opdycke Lamme, and Jacquie L’Etang. Pathways to Public Relations: Histories of Practice and Profession. 1st edition. Routledge New Directions in Public Relations and Communication Research. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Stratton, David H. Spokane & the Inland Empire: An Interior Pacific Northwest Anthology. Rev. ed. Pullman, Wash.: Washington State University Press, 2005.
Wiebe, Robert H. The Search for Order, 1877–1920. The Making of America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.

The term “aspirational metropolis” credited to Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen, who I am working with on a directed study exploring the history of Public Relations in America.