About the Exhibit
According to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, “The brief life and tragic end of the Royal Mail Ship Titanic coincided with the first “golden age” of picture postcards, which lasted from 1907 to 1915, and postcards form an important part of the ship’s legacy.” Before the disaster, the picture postcards that circulated were largely to advertise the ship as the largest in the world, including text to reference her size and cost. However, when the Titanic sank, many of these postcards were recalled and subsequently reissued with different text to memorialize the event and the lives that were lost. Other postcards were issued specifically to memorialize the Titanic, likely to capitalize on the market for Titanic disaster postcards.
The various picture postcards carry both historical and rhetorical significance. We might, then, productively take up Cara A. Finnegan’s method that “accounts for images as history as well as images in history” (199). To that end, I have created an exhibit to showcase the ways in which considering the production, reproduction, and circulation of the Titanic postcards enables us to better understand both the rhetorical force of the postcards and the historical event itself.
References for the exhibit, including the postcards, is listed under References.
Navigate the exhibit by using the menu above or following the black buttons in the lower right corner.
