This study examines one aspect of the visual culture that was emerging in the United States in the early twentieth century. It focuses on the role commercial manufacturers of three-dimensional photographs called stereographs played, not only in creating the first mass-circulated images of foreign countries, but in shaping common American perceptions about the meaning photographs had for the "modern age."

Through advertisements, door-to-door salesmen, publications for home consumers, and school materials, the stereograph companies promoted the notion that visual knowledge was superior to all other ways of knowing. The industry's prime motivation was to sell its product, but in doing so it also sold ideas about manifest destiny, imperialism, American citizenship, and technological progress, as well as a national collective vision of the world.

Using stereographs of China and Japan as representative examples, this study shows that some images of foreign countries took on a life of their own in the early twentieth century. Severed from the political and economic events that might be thought to have affected them, these photographic images continued to be produced and sold unaltered for decades.

The first chapter gives a brief history of the stereograph industry, identifies stereographs as a consumer product within the nascent "culture of consumption" at the turn of the century, and describes how stereographs were marketed to home buyers. The second chapter examines the role stereograph companies played in the visual education movement that swept the country in the days of Progressive school reform and that helped put stereographs in over two-thirds of the school systems in the nation by 1936. Chapter two also analyzes the message about visual knowledge the companies expounded in their teachers' guides and students' workbooks. Chapter three looks at the experiences of a stereographer, James Ricalton, who photographed China and whose stereographs later were packaged for home and school viewers, while chapter four examines the work of Herbert Ponting, a stereographer of Japan. In chapter five, stereographs of the United States boxed for classroom use are contrasted with those of Japan and China.