Reviews for Historic Photos of Jacksonville

The average rating for Historic Photos of Jacksonville based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-05-03 00:00:00 Melissa Winders With Historic Photos of Jacksonville, Turner Publishing piles another title on the growing stack of Nostalgia Coffee Table Books (TM) featuring the Bold New City of the South, the first of its two collaborations with prominent local historian Prof. Carolyn Williams, who passed away in 2011. After a brief preface by publisher Todd Bottoroff - who seems to use the same text in every Turner Publishing introduction, and whose absurd comments about the objectivity of photography I've mocked elsewhere- Historic divides itself into four chronologically-arranged chapters featuring images from 1850-1901, 1902-1919, 1920-1939, and 1940-1960s. Each opens with an extremely brief overview of what life in Jacksonville was like during each of those eras, then segues directly into its selection of gorgeously reproduced (if occasionally generic) black and white photos. The books closes with a Notes section which conveniently lists all the photos used, along with their accession numbers from the State Archive. Most of what's wrong with Historic can probably be chalked up to it being just another in the endless Historic Photos of XXXX series churned out by this publisher. Their template doesn't encourage in-depth scholarship, or even particularly useful captioning, which can be frustrating for readers coming to the work with anything more than a passing curiosity. Few of the photos come with specific location information (admittedly, a personal pet peeve of mine), some of the street views are confusingly labelled (I'm not clear how one looks north along Forsyth, which runs east-west), and several captions are like something straight out of a high school yearbook ("Riverside, located along the river, in 1869" being the award-winner in that category). There are also at least a couple of factual errors which may have been editorial accidents; to the best of my knowledge there was never a Bull Street (p28) in Downtown Jacksonville, and the image on p126 represented as being the Municipal Engineering building on North Main clearly isn't (the accession number in the citation at the end pulls up a different image in the State Archive, which does actually feature the City Engineer's building). Though pretty and moderately interesting, Historic's lack of contextualizing information means it fails to make a good argument for its own existence in an era where all of its images can be easily accessed on FloridaMemory.com. Readers interested in more than a cursory look at the city's past would do better to look at Williams's second collaboration with Turner, Remembering Jacksonville, which at least benefits from a more diverse array of images, or - better yet - hunt down a copy of Wayne Wood's The Jacksonville Family Album, the gold-standard of Jacksonville's Nostalgia Coffee Table Books (TM).

Review # 2 was written on 2017-06-07 00:00:00 Roy Brown You would have to be a Jacksonville native. Good collection but a little too much emphasis on buildings. Not as good as "Jacksonville's Family Album".