To learn about the American history start with the Collection of Architectural Vignettes on Commercial Stationery at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library of the Columbia University. There are 1,300 letterhead prints with the architectural imagery, dating from 1850 to 1920.
How the times have changed, just in the last hundred years! Businesses took pride in their factory structures. They put the buildings at the top of the stationery, it was the logo, the marketing brochure and the sign of the proud capitalism. Today these very structures are the city blight, if lucky converted into lofts, galleries or condos. The actual manufacturing and the production is invisible, offshored or hidden in the obscure and remote warehouses. A company front today is a halogen lit executive lobby or a horizon bound view from an Aeron decked conference room, with a mannequin mixed race blond and a brunette in the background, longingly caressing a power point presentation. The historic stationery flaunts the box-like, utilitarian, neat, masculine, angular structures with the ubiquitous, ever-present phallic chimneys blowing the black smoke as the sign of the industrious rigor.
Imagine if in the next hundred years the culture, the economy and the iconic symbols will change as drastically? Imagine the dislocation required for such a dramatic change, in just a three generations. Imagine the unenvious toil by the workers inside the factories but also imagine the America at its peak, the world magnet, the land of the unmatched opportunities. The America that made things and made things happen.