HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

The First American Christmas Cards


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Have you ever wondered where the tradition of sending Christmas cards every year came from? While the first Christmas cards appeared in Britain back in the 1840s, it was a German immigrant named Louis Prang who made them popular in the United States and around the world. Using a revolutionary new color printing technique that he called chromolithography, Prang’s Roxbury factory made the most popular greeting cards in the country from the 1870s until the turn of the century.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/316/

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America’s First Christmas Cards
  • Louis Prang’s war map of Charleston Harbor
  • Prang chromolithographs from the BPL
  • “Louis Prang and the First American Cards,” Chase, E. Dudley. (1956). The romance of greeting cards: an historical account of the origin, evolution and development of Christmas cards, valentines and other forms of greeting cards from the earliest days to the present time.
  • “Yule Spirit Highlights: Nutty Cards,” The Vanderbilt Hustler. Dec. 1964.
  • Barnhill, Georgia B. “Business Practices of Commercial Nineteenth-Century American Lithographers.” Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 48, no. 2/3, 2014
  • Ristow, Walter W. “Worlds of Christmas Greetings.” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, vol. 35, no. 4, 1978
  • GOODBAR, OCTAVIA. “Cards.” Current History (1916-1940), vol. 47, no. 3, 1937
  • Morrill, Edward. “Old Prints: Louis Prang – Lithographer.” Hobbies – The Magazine for Collectors, August 1940
  • Mills, Benjamin Fay. “Louis Prang, Popularizer of Art.” Vocations, Volume X: The Fine Arts, 1911
  • Los Angeles Herald, June 16, 1909
  • Paywalled news
    • Boston Globe, Dec 31, 1882
    • New-York Tribune, May 09, 1880
    • The (Chicago) Inter Ocean, Dec 10, 1881
    • The (Launceston, Tasmania) Examiner, Dec 14, 1882
    • ...more
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