Prior to interning at the Library Company, I was unaware of the word “ephemera.” I had to look up the definition before writing this blog post. Webster defines ephemera as “paper items (such as posters, broadsides, and tickets) that were originally meant to be discarded after use but have since become collectibles.” During my internship with the Print Department, I have worked primarily with two forms of ephemera: trade cards from late 19th-century Philadelphia and American posters produced during World War One. When I began my internship, interacting with these documents felt alien. Posters addressing a war that occurred a century ago and advertisements directed towards an audience from the later 1800s are strange to encounter. I did not understand the humor in the trade cards or how an early 20th-century American audience would respond to such cheerful representations of war. After describing 300 posters and handling over 1000 trade cards, I began to recognize similarities between the current American culture I’m familiar with and the American culture that this ephemera was created in. I began to realize that these posters and trade cards had been produced for and by Americans. Although I was viewing them from a different era, I was still able to recognize and identify with various themes that occurred in them.

Patriotism was a running theme in the posters. With bright and cheerful color schemes, the posters enticed young men to join the ranks and citizens to conserve food or buy Liberty Bonds. Having grown up in a more cynical, post-9/11 world, these bubbly depictions of wartime seemed on the borderline of bizarre. The military recruitment advertisements of my time have more camo tones than they do cheerful yellow and blue ones. However, I was still able to recognize the reverential attitude that current Americans still hold toward those in the Armed Services. Soldiers were portrayed as strong and proud men, their bravery and sacrifice shown to be something all Americans should aspire towards.