Arcadian Visions of the Past Mark Rice

Arcadia's production process directly affects the content of the books it publishes. Because Arcadia Publishing places tight limits both on the content and the scope of the books it publishes, it narrows the range of options open to the books' authors of how best to address their subjects. Arcadia is able to reduce typesetting and printing costs by limiting text to brief introductions and image captions, using a standardized cover design, and mandating a strict limit of exactly 128 pages. The standardized format, page length, and cover design allow readers to quickly identify the series. Significantly, the same standardization also suggests that all of the books are of equal quality, despite the facts that not all of the books are written by trained historians, and that "Arcadia Publishing does not have an internal peer review or fact-checking process" (Kellet). By keeping the price of the books under 20 dollars and promoting the large number of images to be found inside, Arcadia promises readers an affordable and detailed tour through local history. Finally, the technologies used to quickly, efficiently, and affordably print a large number of titles constrain the range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of local history.

Despite the huge numbers of titles and the geographic range of the series, both of which would suggest a need for diversity, standardization is the most salient features of the books. (Looking at a stack of Arcadia books on my desk, my six-year-old son quite sensibly asked me if the same person wrote all of them.) This standardization serves as a built-in marketing strategy for a company that until recently relied almost completely on local publicity and word-of-mouth to promote its books. Once a person knows what an "Images of America" book looks like, it becomes easy to spot them in town after town. Each book's front cover has a single full-bleed sepia-toned photograph that can also be found inside the book (though without the sepia toning) and that frequently shows residents engaged in some kind of social activity such as dancing, attending a parade, or working. A red-bordered black Palladian banner at the top provides the book's title, and a smaller banner at the bottom names the author. The cover photograph continues across the spine and onto the back cover, the remainder of which is black and contains a brief summary of the book, an image of the state with the location of the community marked with a red star, and the state flag. The book design seems intended to promote pride in local heritage. The sepia toning is a metonym for "the olden days," which for many Americans is nostalgically recalled as a simpler era when community bonds were stronger than they are today. Whether or not intentional, the standardized theme continues within the pages of the "Images of America" series as different communities can come to look almost indistinguishable, with one streetcar scene virtually interchangeable with the next.

The nostalgic nature of Arcadia's visions of the past is reinforced by the other book series the company publishes (for example, "Images of Baseball" and "Images of Rail") as well as by the company's website, which was awarded 2006 "Best Publishing Website" award from the Web Marketing Association. When visitors first visit the website, they are greeted with slow violin music that sounds as though it had been lifted from a Ken Burns documentary. As the music plays, a company motto appears: "Within every photograph, in every American city, are stories to be told."( The words fade out, and a series of photographs appear in slide-show format. Each photograph is sepia-toned, and each appears to be from the 1920s or earlier. The first image shows a group of travelers who have pulled to the side of the road on a hill overlooking a small town, gathered in and around their large convertible to gaze down at the pastoral scene below. The second looks down on a busy city street filled with Model T's and trolley cars. The third is taken from the stands of a baseball game, the audience a sea of straw hats and white shirts. The fourth is an up-close view of a trolley car on a city street. The fifth shows a group of workers standing in front of a row of wagons that have just been made in the large warehouse behind them. The images provide a quick glimpse of what readers can expect to find in the "Images of America" books. From rural idyll to maturing town or city, the books show growth and change, and celebrate both hard work and leisure activities.

When the slide show is complete, the website allows viewers to click on a map of the United States in order to do a geographic search for titles in their area. Viewers can also choose which series of books they want to browse through. The website's sepia toning is consistent throughout, and the words "heritage" and "nostalgia" are used frequently to frame the way Arcadia views the past. The different series are oriented to different market segments-railway buffs, sports enthusiasts, etc. Pleasant reveries of the past are promoted over scholarly rigor or methodologically grounded interpretations of historical photographs. Bucolic (indeed, Arcadian) scenes of supposedly simpler days of yore are showcased, accumulating into an extensive catalog of historical images that show a great deal, but actually reveal little about the past.

As noted earlier, Arcadia's standardization of history continues on the insides of its books as well. Each book in the "Images of America" series is 128 pages in length and includes an introduction and multiple chapters organized by the author. As might be expected, the chapters frequently are organized spatially (particularly in books dealing with large or medium-sized cities), moving readers in and around the community, taking a look at the passage of time as it appeared in specific neighborhoods. Some authors maintain tight control on chronology along with their spatial organization, moving forward through time page-by-page, while other authors move back and forth more freely through time, preferring a thematic approach over a strict chronology. With either approach, however, the emphasis in the "Images of America" series is on appearance, with the implicit reasoning that to know what a place looked like in the past is to know the history of that place. This spatial arrangement is a key feature of the books and reflects the "who" and "where" questions that guide the series. Arcadia places little emphasis on explaining how the past had any influence on the present; the books I've looked at frequently ignore how and why things happened in the past, and what the consequences were of political, economic, social, or cultural shifts. In this sense, the books are actually quite ahistorical, presenting the past as a series of things that happened seemingly in a vacuum.

The standardization of the books makes it easy for readers to assume that all of the history contained within is roughly co-equal in terms of chronology, significance of historical events, accuracy, and quality of writing, despite the very real variations in each of these. Every town, neighborhood, or topic is worth 128 pages of information, no matter what. Thus, Levittown, at slightly more than 50 years old, merits precisely as much attention as Santa Fe, which has been inhabited for several hundred years, and Gettysburg's history is no more significant than that of Gilroy, California. It is tempting to view such an approach as a laudable democratization of history, but Arcadia's reasons for such a radical leveling of the past stem largely from a desire to manage costs through standardization.

While it is true that any town can have multiple titles written about it, and one can argue that these titles build larger portraits of larger places, individual titles stand alone, and little effort is made to indicate that any book is only a partial story for a particular city and that readers should buy additional books for a more complete history. Indeed, because the format of the "Images of America" books provides both a spatial and a chronological tour of the subject, readers may be left with the impression that a coherent and complete story has been told in each book. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that a small town couldn't have multiple titles written about it as well, just as long as there are enough photographs to fill the pages and enough authors willing to write the captions. The only limit to Arcadia's books is the limit of the marketplace-as long as there are people willing to write them and buy them, new titles will continue to be published.

The format and the design of Arcadia Publishing's books raise important questions about the way the company approaches history; the uses of historical photographs in its books deserve even closer scrutiny. Upon first glance, historical photographs seem like natural paths into the past because, as the Lawrence Levine has written, every photograph "seems to be the quintessential objective document — reality in black and white — and thus makes a greater claim on our credulity than other types of documents" (269). Most people are inclined to believe what they see in photographs, particularly older photographs that record a time before computer software made image manipulation as simple as it is today. Given that "[m]ost of Arcadia's customers are over 45 years old and somewhat less immersed in technology than younger Web surfers" (Dyszel), it is likely that the Arcadia's main market readership is even more trusting in photographic images than younger readers would be. In addition, the captions that are written by the books' authors help anchor meanings in the photographs and are offered as objective statements of fact and not as the subjective interpretations of the images by the authors, which they routinely are.

In some ways, the use of photographs in the "Images of America" series echoes the use of photographs in pictorial histories in the late nineteenth century as recounted by Gregory Pfitzer in his book, Picturing the Past. The criticisms leveled one hundred years ago remain appropriate today:

Given the potential for manipulation and artifice in the production of photographic images, it is no wonder that many questioned whether photos were really any more useful than pictorial illustrations had been in the pursuit of accuracy in the study of the past. . . . At least with illustrations, the reader of pictorial works knew that "some interpretive recreation" was implied and that the illustrator of historical events acted self- consciously at some level as a representational artist. With the photograph, the assumption of objectivity gave observers the false security that they were in the presence of images that required no interpretation, when, in fact, the camera's seeming "impartiality" imposed more analytic demand than less. (225)

Pfitzer goes on to note that the "uses and misuses of photographs remind us that, as with pictorial illustrations, the context for the transfer of visual information is crucial to an understanding of its meaning" (228), and critics in the late nineteenth century were quick to complain about the too-casual use of photographs in historical texts. For much of the twentieth century, pictorial histories receded into the background, but they became prominent once again in the latter decades of the century. In the 1970s, photographic histories were published widely in the nostalgia ushered in by the nation's Bicentennial celebration, leading historians and cultural theorists to point out the challenges of using photographs as historical resources. In his own discussion of the "beguiling" nature of photographs, Levine points out that "[p]hotographic images, like statistics, do not lie, but like statistics the truths they communicate are elusive and incomplete" (262).

Writing about nineteenth-century photographs of the American West, the historian Martha Sandweiss outlines a range of theoretical and methodological concerns about the ways in which photographs are put to use to illustrate, describe, or understand the past. Echoing Levine's observation about the inherent subjectivity of historical photographs, Sandweiss notes that historical photographs are "deeply selective sorts of evidence," and points out that, in addition to the photographers' selection, many important dimensions of the past, including "economic forces, political ideologies, [and] long-term weather cycles are not easily photographed" (327). Again, such dimensions of the past are largely absent in Arcadia's books, confined-at most-to brief asides in captions of photographs that show something else. Sandweiss writes that photographs "can evoke a sense of familiarity that belies the essential unknowability of the past" (10) an apt description of the problematic nature of Arcadia Publishing's reliance upon historical photographs.

Sandweiss argues that in addition to considering the subject found in photographs, historians have a responsibility to approach historical photographs both in history and through history. That is, historians need to make an effort to understand "the circumstances of [a photograph's] making, the photographer's intent, the public function of the image, [and] the ways in which it was received and understood by contemporary audiences." At the same time, historians need to pay attention to the life of a photograph once divorced from its original context as it "might have moved into archives or attics, museums or scrapbooks, and the ways in which it has been reinterpreted over time" (9). In the "Images of America" books I have examined, there is little apparent effort to understand photographs either in or through history. In a related vein, important issues about a community's past are necessarily left unexamined if no photographs that show them. Moreover, photographs are routinely presented as easily understood documents that reveal some essential truth about the subject without much more than a brief caption of context.

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Mark Rice is Chair of the Department of American Studies at St. John Fisher College.