Taming the Land: The Lost Postcard Photographs of the Texas High Plains Volume 12

By John Miller Morris

A postcard craze gripped the nation from 1905 to 1920, as the rise of outdoor photography coincided with a wave of settlement and prosperity in Texas. Hundreds of people took up cameras, and photographers of note chose some of their best work for duplication as photo postcards--sold for a nickel and mailed for a penny to distant friends and relatives. These postcards, which now enjoy another kind of craze in the collecting world, left what author John Miller Morris calls a "significant visual legacy" of the history and social geography of Texas. For more than a decade, Morris has been finding and studying the photographers and methodically gathering their postcards. In Taming the Land , he shares those finds with readers, introducing each photographer and providing interpretive descriptions of the places, people, or events depicted in the photographs. The stories the cards tell--in the images captured and the messages carried--add an exceptional dimension to our understanding of life in rural Texas a century ago. Taming the Land presents postcards from twenty-four counties in the booming Texas Panhandle. This is the first book in a set called Plains of Light, which will collect and document turn-of-the-twentieth-century photo postcards from all over West Texas.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1603440372
• ISBN13: 9781603440370
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 4.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 11.3" x 12.2"