The Enduring Value of ‘Ephemera’: Postcards from Scotland

Do you ever consider the potential value of today’s’ ‘throw-away’ items to future historians? Imagine how your emails, texts, Tweets and direct messages could be used to explore your life and the world in which you lived.

In fall 2019 students in UNIV*1200, ‘The History of Stuff’, spent a semester exploring Guelph’s extraordinary archival collections of ephemera, and came up with projects that reveal the exceptional evidentiary value of the postcard. Though we are long from its ‘Golden Age’ in the early twentieth century, the postcard has endured, especially as a medium of communication during travels. In this exhibit, we use Scotland as a case study to examine the richness of the postcard as an historical source.

We invite you to join us as we explore these ‘Greetings from Scotland’! 

CC BY-NC-ND:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Archival & Special Collections, University of Guelph Library, Guelph, ON

Credits

Curated by students in Kevin James' s UNIV*1200 class: Jazel Joy Banaag, Aritra Bhattacharjee, Andres Bravo, Rajpreet Chakkal, Trent Claessens, Sukhraj Garcha, Peter Kim, Alexandra Lindau, Riley MacPherson, Natasha McNeil-Beckett, Rehan Nagoor Mohideen, Nicole Pacella, Ainsley Robertson, Kaitlyn Robson, Shea Sorrell, Erin Wagg, Britany Wasswa, Georgia Weber

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