Movie Mavens: US newspaperwomen take on the movies, 1914-1923

Abstract

of the park as well as the rhetoric of wonder. In the final essay in part III, ‘Art and the Expeditionary Impulse’, Capello focuses on Albert Operti, the historical Arctic painter (Chapter 11). In this chapter, he considers the popularity of Operti’s work in the context of the Arctic sublime and its perpetuation as a vernacular visual culture by exploring a variety of media, including paintings, periodical illustrations, postcards, tobacco cards, dioramas and travel exhibits. The discussion of the ‘popular sublime’ and commercialisation of the Far North in vernacular/ephemeral forms (217) expands the theme of this collection to the imagined expeditionary ideals beyond physical experience and direct observation. The inclusion of works by art historians, historians and geographers, as well as the origin of the project, gives Cartographic Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Americas a breadth of diversity of issues and subjects. Unfortunately, although this book deals with the visual and material culture of mapping, the hardcover copy offers only black-and-white illustrations. Despite this limitation, however, this volume should serve as a good example for future studies of the Americas as hemispheric studies of visual culture rather than as nation-centred histories. This book will be of value to anyone who is interested in cartography and identity as well as in transnational histories within or beyond the geographical region of the Americas. Moreover, the issue of borders and the implications of lines resonate with current territorial disputes about national boundaries.