Glass Plate Negatives

This primary source set focuses on glass plate negatives and lantern slide photographs depicting Pennsylvania higher education institutions and their predecessors, including Haverford College, Millersville State Normal School (now Millersville University), and the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women (now Temple University’s Ambler Campus).

Towards the end of the 19th century, colleges in the United States were changing in order to attract more students to their campuses. Colleges began allowing students to choose their courses of study and offering enjoyable social experiences with extracurricular activities, student organizations, and athletics. Research universities first appeared in the United States at the end of the 19th century, which added academic credibility to the American higher education system as a whole. By the 1910s, middle class families viewed college as the ticket to obtaining white collar employment for their children. Upper class families also relied on higher education to give their children access to managerial positions in the newly industrialized economy, thus preserving their high status within society. The college experience was becoming a meaningful part of American culture.

Photography was also advancing during the late 19th century. Glass plate negatives were first invented in the 1850s, and they quickly became popular because they produced more detailed photographs and multiple prints could be made from the negative. Improvements to the production of glass plate negatives in the 1870s made using glass plates easier, more convenient, and more accessible to amateur photographers. A variation on glass plate negative photography was the lantern slide, a positive image reproduction of an existing negative, used for both education and entertainment.

Photographs provide a wealth of information to historians, as they recreate in exact detail a particular moment from the past. However, from the early beginnings of photography, photographs were composed with an audience and purpose in mind. Photographs often marked important moments and milestones in a person’s life, much like we use photography today. Elements like the subjects’ poses, expressions, clothing and props or objects visible in the frame were used to signify characteristics about the subject such as their social status or character. Learning to “read” photographs as primary sources like historians requires that we examine the composition choices of photographs in addition to what the photographs portray.