Syllabus

This work was created as a scholarly output for a directed study called Historical Perspectives of Public Relations taught by Dr. Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen in Spring 2025. This paper reframes my thesis as a hypothetical course taught to 400 level undergraduates. This exercise helped me simplify language around the central project and pare down source material to the most essential authors.

HIST 461: American Commercial Imagery, 1880-1920

3 Semester-Hour Credits

Course Introduction

Have you ever walked around in a grocery store, looked at a billboard or watched a commercial and wondered why they were designed that way and what meaning it is attempting to convey? By analyzing commercial imagery in advertisements and the packaging of the products themselves, we can make new insights into both producers and consumers during this final period of the industrial era in the United States.

This course will introduce students to the field of material history, which allows us to understand mass produced objects through the context of archaeology, sociology and history. It focuses on a pivotal moment in the formation of the professional advertising industry, as corporate founders leveraged consumer fears following the Civil War and later adopted progressive era language into their commercial imagery to reposition their products as tools of social betterment. Studying corporations from the United States lets us examine how company founders communicated to consumers both local and international, and how the formation of more distant trade routes changed the nature of their visual language. Finally, we will examine how the first world war legitimized these early approaches to marketing and public relations.

The in-person classes will be discussion focused, examining that week’s reading materials. Discussions are student-led and professor moderated, to help undergraduates create their own connections to the material and form a collaborative knowledge base. We will begin the course with an overview of methodologies that historians have used to understand these types of materials and a brief introduction to archiving. Then the course will explore the development of industrialization in the US, the creation of the advertising and public relations industry and conclude on the different social lenses that historians have used to examine corporate imagery. Additionally, there will be one collaborative and one independent project which will teach students how to search the archives and make their own historical insights into these materials.

Learning Objectives

Material History Methodology: Students should understand the basic principles of material history in relation to the other major historical methodologies.
Archival Competency: Students will gain competency in what archives are, how they are created and how to search for and find materials.
The Development of Industrialization in the United States: Students will establish a foundational knowledge of how corporate America evolved throughout this forty-year window, including governmental and public reactions to this expansion.
The Development of Marketing and Public Relations in the United States: Students should be able to describe the formation of this industry as well as how past scholars have approached this area of study.
Approaches for Visual Resources: Through reading and discussion, students will gain a competency in how the authors of this course utilized a diverse range of primary and secondary sources to examine historical visual materials.

Assignments

Each week’s lesson will consist of two seventy five minute classes discussing the reading materials, developing archival skills or presenting research. Students will also compose three 350 word book reviews over the fifteen weeks engaging with the reading materials. Students select which texts they review and when they review them. The first week will include reading a chapter of a work and a review of that work to help orient students on this format.

The midterm will be a collaborative presentation between two paired students discussing their commercial artifact that they selected from the special collections workshop on week three. Students will discuss the different ways their artifacts could be examined, its relationship to the region and what methodological approaches they might use to understand their object. These presentations will be held on week seven.

The course will end on a six-page research paper and a 10-minute lecture by each student individually on a set of materials of their choosing which demonstrates their comprehension of the final learning objective. Think of the research paper as the more formal version of your presentation with findings and references.

Grading

Title	Points	Percentage	Total
Discussion Participation	13.33	5%	X 15 = 200
Book Reviews	50	12.5%	250
Collaborative Project	50	12.5%	300
Final Project	100	50%	400

A: 360-400

B: 320-359

C: 280-319

Course Schedule and Themes

Week 1: Introduction to the Academic Book Review Format

Cronon, William, George A. Miles, and Jay Gitlin. Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.
- Kennecott Journey Chapter
Wunder, John R. Review of Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, by William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin. Great Plains Research 3, no. 2 (1993): 359–62.
- In class: discuss syllabus, grading, course overview and academic book review format

Week 2: Methodology

Gunn, Simon, and Lucy Faire. Research Methods for History. Research Methods for the Arts and Humanities. Edinburgh: University Press, 2012.
- Chap. 1-4
Gerritsen, Anne, and Giorgio Riello. Writing Material Culture History. Second edition. Writing History. London, UK ; Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
- Introduction, Chapter 1 & 3

Week 3: Introduction to Archiving

Roe, Kathleen D. “Why Archives?” American Archivist 79, no. 1 (2016): 6–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26356697.
Posner, Ernst. “Some Aspects of Archival Development since the French Revolution.” American Archivist 3, no. 3 (1940): 159–72. http://www.jstor.org/-stable/40288201.
- In class: Special Collections workshop and selecting artifact week seven collaborative project

Week 4: American Industrialization

Robert H. Wiebe. The Search for Order, 1877-1920. The Making of America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.
- Chapters 1-5

Week 5: Formation of Trade Routes

Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Norton Paperback. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992.
- Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 7

Week 6: The Development of Public Relations

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.
- Chapters 1-5

Week 7 - No reading to prepare for collaborative presentations

Week 8: Understanding Producer and Consumer Relationships

Marchand, Roland. Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
- Chapters 1-4

Week 9: Advertising in the Progressive Era

Laird, Pamela Walker. Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. Studies in Industry and Society. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
- Chapters 1-4 and 9

Week 10: Monopoly, Regulation and the Built Environment

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.
- Chapters 1-3
Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
- Chapter 2

Week 11: Corporate Imagery and Race

Manring, M. M. Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. The American South Series. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998.
- Chapters 1-4

Week 12: Corporate Imagery and Gender

Margaret Finnegan. Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture & Votes for Women. Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
- Chapters 1-3 and 5

Week 13: Corporate Imagery and Cultural Identity

Christensen, Bonnie. Red Lodge and the Mythic West: Coal Miners to Cowboys. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002.
- Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5

Week 14: Iconography in Advertising

Black, Jennifer M. Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America. American Business, Politics, and Society. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024.
- Chapters: Introduction, 2, 3 and 5

Week 15 - No reading to prepare for final presentations