Dr. Amy DeFalco Lippert

Amy Lippert is the author of Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. She is Assistant Professor of American History and the College at the University of Chicago. Dr. Lippert was born in San Francisco and received her BA, MA, and Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Berkeley. She has held fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, the Bancroft Library, and the Huntington Library. Her research and teaching focus on the cultural and social history of the United States in the 19th century, with a special interest in the mass production, consumption, and popular interaction with visual imagery and problems of perception. She teaches courses and seminars on Visual Culture in American Life, 19th-century U.S. Cultural and Social History, the U.S. West, American Urban History, Gender and Sexuality, American Cultural Institutions, Consumerism and Mass Culture, and Death and Memory. You can view several examples of her visual sources, along with hyperlinks to digitized sources from a host of archives around the nation, at her website.

Photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in nineteenth-century society. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it.

Consuming Identities explores the significance of the pictorial revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which people navigated the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the spread of capitalism and class formation to immigration and urbanization. Images themselves were inextricably associated with these world-changing forces; they were commodities, but as representations of people, they also possessed special cultural qualities that gave them new meaning and significance. Visual media transcended traditional boundaries of language and culture that divided diverse groups within the same urban space. From the 1848 conquest of California and the gold discovery to the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco anticipated broader cultural transformations in the commodification, implementation, and popularity of images. For the city’s inhabitants and sojourners, an array of imagery came to mediate, intersect with, and even constitute social interaction in a world where virtual reality was becoming palpable.