| This dissertation, Printing Place: Mass Media and the Arid West, 1840–1910, attempts to span the gap that so often emerges between the experience of place and its representation in popular media during the heyday of westward expansion and its immediate aftermath. This divide is nowhere more important than in this region, a place so different from the landscapes to which most Americans were accustomed, and during this era, when the struggle to make sense of the region created long-lasting policies, practices, and perceptions that reverberate still. While a thorough disentanglement of the topographic realities, cultural biases, and individual creativity within any Western landscape is impossible, we can see which components surface where in a given image by studying how visual media came to function as the connective tissue between the observations of a few and the perceptions of many.;In focusing on the landscapes that arose from the work of three powerful men—John C. Frémont, John Wesley Powell, and Frederic Remington—this dissertation examines how the skillful manipulation of visual media allows images to achieve and retain cultural power. By bringing together case studies from the histories of lithography, photography, and halftone printing, I aim to present the work of these men less as an object of historical inquiry and more as a product of the intersection between seemingly new lands and newer technologies; between those who Remington referred to as "imaginative men" and a modern world eager to know and to push its own dimensions. |
