Project: Florida Digital Postcards Exhibit

The Florida Digital Postcard exhibit is a curated presentation of the digitized images from The Hampton Dunn Florida Postcard collection housed in the University of South Florida Libraries Special Collections. An output of the first stage in the full-scale digitization of the collection, this exhibit features over three hundred postcards on Hillsborough County. Drawn mostly from the first half of the twentieth century (and many from the Golden Age of Postcards), the images bring to view the streets, waterways, industry and society from the founding of modern Tampa. The exhibit provides a visual history of significant events and everyday life, of buildings and travel, of nostalgia and progress that characterized Florida. Inscribed with brief narratives of correspondents, the cards record the voices of travelers, businessmen, separated friends and family who passed through this place in history. Filled with alligators and airplanes, palm trees and bridges, the postcards raise questions about how people approached this exotic and fruitful land in the days before air conditioning. The cards invite us to join them in the past and re-envision the place we inhabit now.