Portrait of Route 66
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, February 10, 2017
STEPHENVILLE, Texas—Tarleton State University history professor Dr. T. Lindsay Baker has received the Ray & Pat Browne Award from the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association.
The award recognizes his book, Portrait of Route 66: Images from the Curt Teich Postcard Archives (Oklahoma Press, 2016), as the “Best Reference/Primary Source Work” in popular culture published in 2016.
Baker’s book showcases photographs that he discovered in the archives of Curt Teich & Company of Chicago, for many years the largest postcard publisher in the United States. Customers submitted the black-and-white photographs with orders for color postcards during the years before the invention and widespread use of color photography.
The volume consists of the photos and the postcards they inspired as illustrations showing the roadside along former U.S. Highway 66 between Chicago and Los Angeles.
“It is difficult to imagine that no previous historian had ever sought out original photographs from this collection, but they all had just asked for printed postcards,” Baker said.
Professors Ray Browne and Russell Nye founded the Popular Culture Association in 1971, separating it from the larger American Studies Association. They believed the country needed an organization to examine material culture, motion pictures, popular music and comics. In 1979, it was joined by the American Culture Association, and together they foster the intellectual study of popular culture.
Baker holds Tarleton’s W.K. Gordon Endowed Chair in Texas Industrial History. He teaches in the university’s Department of Social Sciences and directs the W.K. Gordon Center for Industrial History at Thurber, Texas.
Tarleton, a member of The Texas A&M University System, provides a student-focused, value-driven educational experience marked by academic innovation and exemplary service, and dedicated to transforming students into tomorrow’s professional leaders. With campuses in Stephenville, Fort Worth, Waco, Midlothian and online, Tarleton engages with its communities to provide real-world learning experiences and to address societal needs while maintaining its core values of integrity, leadership, tradition, civility, excellence and service.
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Contact:
Dr. T. Lindsay Baker
254-968-1886
[email protected]
