Relevant Links

(places to look for artifacts)

 

Highly Recommended: How to Analyze Ads

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/Ads/

This guide, written by Daniel Pope, offers an overview of advertisements as historical sources and how historians use them, a brief history of advertising, questions to ask when interpreting ads as historical evidence, an annotated bibliography, and a guide to finding advertisements online.

 

English Professor’s Website on How to Analyze Advertising:

http://webserve.govst.edu/pa/Advertising/intropitch.htm

 

Jim Crow paraphanalia

http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/menu.htm

 

Emergence of Advertising in America

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa/

A collaborative effort between the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History and Duke University’s Digital Scriptorium, this site contains images of over 9,000 advertising items and publications dating from 1850 to 1920. Selected items illustrate the rise of consumer culture in America from the mid-19th century and the development of a professionalized advertising industry. The images are grouped into eleven categories: advertising ephemera (trade cards, calendars, almanacs, postcards); broadsides for placement on walls, fences, and sides of buildings; advertising cookbooks from food companies and appliance manufacturers; early advertising publications created by agencies to promote the concepts and methods of the advertising industry; J. Walter Thompson Company “House Ads,” promotional literature from the oldest advertising agency in the U.S.; Kodakiana collection of some of the earliest Kodak print advertisements; Lever Brothers Lux (soap) advertisements; outdoor advertising; and tobacco advertisements. Each category contains a brief (250-word) overview of the subject matter, and each image is accompanied by production information such as the date issued, advertising agency involved, and company for which the advertising was done. The site also includes a timeline of the history of the advertising industry from the 1850s to 1920. It is searchable by keyword or contents of the advertising items. This easy-to-use digital collection is ideal for researching late-19th and early-20th century consumer culture and marketing strategies.

 

Harper’s Advertising (19th century)

http://advertising.harpweek.com/

Harper’s Weekly was the leading illustrated American periodical between 1857 and 1872. This site allows all users who register free access to an online archive of 40,000 advertisements that appeared in Harper’s Weekly. Without registering, visitors have access to 64 ads divided into 11 categories, such as cartoons, endorsements, foreign travel, and insurance. Two of the most compelling categories are “Civil War products,” featuring ads for metallic artificial legs and bulletproof vests and “consumer goods,” including advertisements for appliances, packaged goods, and pest killers. Although the ads include text and images, a 100-word introduction provides the only historical context for the advertisements on this site. For those studying 19th-century advertising and consumer culture, the site will be of interest.

 

Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/rbpehtml/pehome.html

Items are from the U.S. and London, and date from the 17th century to the present, though they originate primarily from the 19th century. They include “a variety of posters, notices, advertisements, proclamations, leaflets, propaganda, manifestos, and business cards,” and pertain to subjects such as the American Revolution, slavery, western migration, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, travel, labor concerns, education, health, and woman suffrage. Users can search by keyword or browse by author, title, genre, or printing location. Of value to those studying various forms of popular print and consumer culture that relate to issues of public concern to ordinary people.

 

Ad*Access

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/

This well-developed, easily navigated site presents images and database information for more than 7,000 advertisements printed primarily in the United States from 1911 to 1955. Material is drawn from the J. Walter Thompson Company Competitive Advertisements Collection of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History at Duke University. The advertisements are divided into five main subjects areas: Radio (including radios, radio parts, and radio programs); Television (including television sets and programs); Transportation (including airlines, rental cars, buses, trains and ships); Beauty and Hygiene (including cosmetics, soaps, and shaving supplies); and World War II (U.S. Government, such as V-mail or bond drives). The ads are searchable by keyword, type of illustration, and special features. A timeline from 1915 to 1955 provides general context for the ads with a chronology of major events. “About Ad Access” provides an overview of advertising history and the Duke collection, as well as a bibliography and list of advertising repositories in the U.S. Excellent archive of primary documents for students of consumer and popular culture.

 

Advertising Archives

http://www.advertisingarchives.co.uk/

British site that features a huge database of British and American advertisements. Must register to use – it’s not clear to me whether you must pay or not.

 

Vaudeville

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma02/easton/vaudeville/vaudeville.html

 

Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/coolhtml/coolhome.html

         Many primary sources. I recommend browsing by subject index.

 

Chicago Worlds Fair 1933-1934

http://www2.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/chicago/

 

Women Working

http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/

Browse the topic “Consumerism” to find sources.

 

Old Radio Commercials

http://www.old-time.com/commercials/

 

http://www.earthstation1.com/radio.html#Commercials

 

http://www.lib.umd.edu/LAB/AUDIO/soundbites.html

 

http://www.lib.umd.edu/LAB/AUDIO/soundbites.html

A sample of 13 audio files of radio commercials from the late 1950s through the early 1960s—part of the Radio Advertising Bureau Collection. This is part of the larger collection of 850 discs, containing approximately 70 hours of material, that have been remastered. The Bureau, a national trade organization, was formed in 1950 (as the Broadcast Advertisers Bureau) to promote radio as a medium for advertisers. The samples—available in two formats, .WAV and .AIFF—include ads for toothpaste, cold medicine, soft drinks, gasoline, beer, cigarettes, cookies, automobiles, dog food, deodorant, and pimple cream. Useful for those studying consumer culture and the use of pop music and radio in advertising.

 

Fifty Years of Coca-Cola Television Advertisements

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ccmphtml/colahome.html

 

Political  TV Ads

http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/

Offers 183 television commercials used since 1952 to sell presidential candidates to the American public and an annotated guide to 21 websites created for the 1996 and 2000 elections. Ads from each election are accessible by year as well as by common themes and strategies used over the years, such as ’Looking Presidential,’ ’Attack Ads,’ ’Family Man,’ and ’Real People.’

 

Cigarettes

Philip Morris Tobacco Advertising Archives

http://www.pmadarchive.com/

 

A Collection of Vintage Cigarette Advertisements – 1940s and 1950s

http://www.chickenhead.com/truth/index.html

 

Misty Slims: Collection of Cigarette Ads – since 1960s

http://misty120s.com/Misty120s/index.php

 

Anti-Tobacco Advertising

http://www.badvertising.org/

Features imaginative anti-smoking ads.

 

AdBusters (a/k/a Culture Jammers)

http://www.adbusters.org/home/

An ANTIadvertising, ANTIcommercialism, ANTItelevision magazine

 

Adflip

http://www.adflip.com/

Adflip is an archive of more than 6,000 print advertisements published from 1940 to the present.  You can look around as a guest, but must pay to subscribe and get the full search.

 

The Commercial Closet

http://www.commercialcloset.org/cgi-bin/iowa/index.html

Advertised as “the world’s largest collection of gay advertising,” this site provides video clips, still photo storyboards, descriptive critiques, and indexing to more than 600 television and print media ad representations of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered. Users can access ads by year; brand; company; business category; themes; region; agency; target group (gays or mainstream); and portrayals (“what the imagery/narrative conveys about gayness”) categorized as vague, neutral, positive, or negative. Although the earliest ad is from 1958, the majority are drawn from the past 10 years.