| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David Morgan. Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production. New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. xiv, 417. $35.00.

Despite frequent professions to the contrary, American Protestants make widespread use of pictures in their day-to-day life and piety. In 1996, David Morgan edited a volume, Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman, that investigated one major twentieth-century example of this phenomenon: Warner Sallman, whose Head of Christ (1940) has been, according to some estimates, reproduced five hundred million times. Now Morgan offers a well-researched and provocative exploration of the nineteenth-century roots of contemporary Protestant engagement with the visual arts. In this account, technological innovation plays a major role. For example, Morgan notes the importance of the successive development of wood engravings, electrotypes, and color halftones, which made the inclusion of pictures in books or tracts progressively cheaper and the quality of reproduction better. But while acknowledging that technology provided the indispensable precondition for the mass production of pictures, Morgan stresses that Protestants were not passively swept along by the latest inventions or by the forces of the secular marketplace. They aggressively used up-to-date technology to pursue their own ends and in the process helped direct the market. In fact, Morgan argues, rather than simply conforming to a secular commercial culture, American Protestantism actively participated in the creation of consumption, powerfully anticipating the commercial use of the mass media (p. 262). . . .

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