“Picturing American Modernity is a noteworthy contribution to the ongoing historiographic reworking of early cinema history. It is based on excellent archival work, which leads to new conclusions about the complex forces that shaped the cinema in its first two decades.”—Anne Friedberg, author of The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft “In Picturing American Modernity, Kristen Whissel thinks through the relation between early cinema and American culture at the turn of the century in imaginative and original ways. Probing cinema’s interaction with both current events and other forms of mass entertainment (such as the Spanish-American War, the World Expositions, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show), Whissel traces the creation of a new mass audience and cinema’s role in shaping the culture of American imperialism. Her in-depth analysis of the films Traffic in Souls and Shoes reveals that the concept of ‘traffic’ can also organize strategies of film narration, as the cinema began to define itself as a new form of storytelling and national identity.”—Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity