Many of the chapters were longwinded and clearly stretching to connect anecdote with theory; the only ones that seemed really solidly argued were the article on telegraph operator fiction by Katherine Stubbs and the article on silhouettes by Wendy Bellion. The others are useful mainly for the historical facts and theory references.

This interesting volume collects essays about how various technologies, many of them now disappeared, were understood and used when they were new. I liked: Wendy Bellion’s study of profiles – created by a device that physically traced over a person’s body – and the meaning of “representationâ€? in art and politics in Jeffersonian American; Patricia Crain’s exploration of the “optical telegraph,â€? used to teach large numbers of school children in rote learning, and the ways it was used to homogenize and enculturare Native American children; Katherine Stubbs on “telegraphic fiction,â€? stories written by telegraph operators about telegraphy, used to express and negotiate anxieties about the feminization of the initially all-male profession; Diane Zimmerman Umble’s piece on competing meanings of the telephone in Amish country – its arrival was so disruptive that it caused both the Amish and the Mennonites to split; and Ellen Gruber Garvey’s fascinating essay on the hobby of scrapbooking, showing how nineteenth-century families created their own identities by clipping bits and pieces from newspapers and other sources and pasting them into books; the scrapbooks often weren’t blank, but were printed books repurposed to function as scrapbooks, industrial-age palimpsests. ( )