The Postcards

Although there's no discernable date on this card, stereoscopic cards were popular from the mid-nineteenth century to the early part of the twentieth century. This card features the front of Robert E. Lee's house in Fort Myer, Virginia. It's interesting to speculate about the purpose or value of the card, for its back reveals various mundane jottings ranging from numbers and math to repeated words and letters in cursive--even though the front of the card is oriented horizontally, the miscellany on the back are mostly read vertically, so the owner (or user) must not have felt constrained by expectations about how the card was meant to be used.

This postcard circulated; it is postmarked January 12, 1914. The message on the back is interesting both in terms of tone and linguistic character. The tone is casual and intimate--even without the salutation "Dear hubby," the writer's diction makes it clear that the sender is close to the recipient: "You owe me a couple dollars for playing rummie. Ha Ha." The writing, itself, does not reflect standard English or "proper grammar," which might suggest that the writer did not know the conventions of standard English or that the writer considered the postcard as a genre where informal language was appropriate.

This is an example of the "busy person's correspondence card," which--judging by similar examples in other digital archives--was a fairly popular trend in postcards. This is difficult to date--there's no postmark on the back, and I couldn't find years in other digital collections; furthermore, there's no easily available online history for the company that printed the card. The card seems to be a tongue-in-cheek remediation of the field service post card used by soldiers during World War I. 

This postcard is an example of early contemporary postcards (it is postmarked July 9, 1950). The front features a stylized image of a fiddler, and the back, interestingly, includes a misspelled translation, where "violonneux" is written "filder." Additionally, the spelling of "violonneux" is curious, as fiddler, in French, is "violoneux," possibly suggesting another typo or a Québécois spelling. This card traveled from Quebec to Bay City, Michigan.