STEPHENVILLE (February 10, 2017) — Tarleton State University history professor Dr. T. Lindsay Baker has received the Ray & Pat Browne Award from the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association.
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.
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