Reading the Shopwindow: How to Analyze Historical Advertisements as Primary Sources

In a 1920s American city, a commuter could meet advertisements at every turn: a newspaper column for toothpaste, a streetcar card for soap, a painted billboard for cigarettes, a shopwindow display for patent medicine. By the 1920s, advertisements filled newspapers, magazines, streetcar cards, billboards, and shop windows, and behind many of them stood an agency such as J. Walter Thompson Co., where copywriters and illustrators turned a client’s product into a selling platform. The printed page looked confident—a headline, a drawing, a testimonial—but it was often the product of negotiation among clients, agency staff, and creative workers. This article explains how to read such advertisements as primary sources. Scope: printed and broadcast commercial advertisements—newspaper and magazine notices, trade cards, posters, catalog pages, and later radio and television spots—analyzed as evidence of production, circulation, reception, and social life. It is not a general history of advertising; it is a method for interrogating advertisements as historical documents.

What Happened?

There is no single event to narrate here; the subject is a discipline of reading. The chronological account of an advertisement begins with its commission and ends with its interpretation by a researcher. Each stage leaves traces that the historian must recover.

1. Commission and negotiation. A client with a product approached an agency. By the 1920s, the process involved clients, account staff, copywriters, and illustrators, and the selling platform often represented a compromise between the client’s opinions and the agency’s creative vision.
2. Production. Copywriters and illustrators translated the platform into headline, image, testimonial, and layout. Rational appeals to health, economy, or efficiency were mixed with emotional appeals to beauty, status, fear, and belonging.
3. Publication and circulation. The advertisement appeared in a specific medium—newspaper, magazine, trade card, poster, streetcar card, or later radio or television—and reached different audiences according to gender, race, class, age, and region.
4. Reading and use. Readers did not receive a single fixed message. Some ignored advertisements, some found them annoying, some read them against the grain, and some acted on them. Market research reports from the period show wide variation in attention even within the same social group.
5. Survival and selection. What survives in archives and digital collections is not a random sample. Libraries, companies, and collectors preserved certain publications, campaigns, and formats more readily than others.
6. Analysis. The historian asks who made the advertisement, for whom, in what medium, with what conventions, what it omitted, and how different audiences may have read it.

How It Was Seen at the Time

Contemporaries did not experience advertisements as neutral records. Advertisers saw them as instruments of persuasion; clients had definite opinions about their products; agency creatives brought their own vision to the work. Consumers read advertisements through the circumstances of their own lives, and critics attacked advertising, especially when it borrowed the language of medicine and science. The prevailing mood was confidence mixed with skepticism: confidence in consumption as a route to the good life, and skepticism about the promises made by sellers.

A skin you love to touch.

That Woodbury Soap line from 1911 sold beauty and intimacy as much as soap. A 1923 Listerine advertisement went further:

Often a bridesmaid but never a bride.

The line linked mouthwash to marriage, social acceptance, and fear of rejection. Such advertisements show how commercial language could turn a personal anxiety into a marketable problem. At the same time, not every reader accepted the message. Advertising provoked determined efforts to restrain and discipline its content, and experts in medicine and science increasingly criticized advertisements that claimed scientific authority without scientific proof.

Historical Snapshot

Different Perspectives

Advertisers and Clients

Clients paying for a campaign often had firm ideas about their product and how to promote it. Agency staff had to reconcile those ideas with their own professional judgment. The resulting selling platform was not a simple expression of one person’s intent but a negotiated compromise. Copywriters and illustrators then brought separate talents and assumptions to the finished advertisement.

Consumers and Audiences

Advertisements had no single fixed meaning. A toothpaste advertisement featuring a young white girl might evoke different responses from a young white man, a middle-aged white woman, and a young African American girl. Gender, ethnicity, race, age, class, and sexual orientation shaped how readers understood health, beauty, status, and propriety. Many readers paid little attention; others found advertisements silly or intrusive; only a smaller group took their messages seriously.

Critics and Experts

As advertising became more popular, criticism became more robust. The more advertisements borrowed from modern medicine and science, the more medical and scientific experts found reason to criticize those borrowings. The explosion of health-related advertising in the early 1900s aroused concern about false claims, unproven remedies, and the commercial exploitation of personal anxiety.

What the Sources Got Wrong

Advertisements are designed to persuade, and they often distort the world they claim to describe. Health-related advertisements promised scientific authority while addressing personal fears about disease and attractiveness. Patent medicine advertisements frequently implied cures and benefits that medical evidence did not support. The Listerine campaign suggested that halitosis was a widespread social menace requiring a branded remedy; the advertisement’s power came from medical language and social anxiety, not from proof that mouthwash would secure a marriage.

Advertisements also omitted inconvenient facts: labor conditions, price, side effects, and the limits of the product. A historian who treats advertising claims as direct evidence of what people believed or what was true will be misled. Market research from the period suggests that advertising’s influence was general and diffuse rather than specific and decisive. Advertisements helped raise awareness of products and problems, but they did not necessarily induce consumers to adopt specific beliefs or buy specific brands.

Contemporary Terminology

• Selling platform: the central appeal or strategy used to promote a product, often negotiated between client and agency.
• Copywriter and illustrator: creative staff who produced the words and images of an advertisement.
• Halitosis: a medical term for bad breath that advertising helped popularize as a social problem.
• Trade card: a small illustrated card used by merchants and manufacturers to advertise goods.
• Patent medicine: a proprietary remedy, often sold with exaggerated claims and little scientific proof.
• Streetcar card: an advertisement placed in public transport, reaching a mobile urban audience.

How Historians See It Today

Modern scholarship distinguishes between the advertisement as a made object and the advertisement as evidence of mentalities. Daniel Pope’s 2003 guide for History Matters warns against treating advertisements as clear, coherent messages whose meaning can be deduced at a glance. Nancy Tomes’s guide for Duke University Libraries describes advertisements as a mirror, albeit a distorted one, of everyday life and aspiration. Historians now ask about the conditions of production, the diversity of reception, the role of regulation and criticism, and the representation of gender, race, class, and health.

The historiographical shift has been from reading advertisements as simple reflections of consumer desire to reading them as complex artifacts. Contemporary agency records show that a single advertisement involved many hands. Readership studies show that audiences responded unevenly. Criticism and regulation shaped what advertisers could say. The modern historian therefore uses advertisements alongside diaries, letters, newspapers, catalogs, sales records, and official documents rather than in isolation.

Related Primary Sources

• J. Walter Thompson Company Archives, Duke University Libraries: agency records, campaign files, copy, and correspondence.
• Ad*Access, Duke University Libraries: digitized historical advertisements from newspapers and magazines.
• Chronicling America, Library of Congress: digitized American newspapers containing advertisements and classified notices.
• John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, Duke University: archives of agencies, advertisers, and marketing research.
• Local newspaper and trade-card collections in county historical societies, public libraries, and museum archives.

Historical advertisements are loud, partial, and revealing. They tell us what sellers wanted people to desire, fear, and buy; they also record the visual and verbal vocabulary of an era. But they do not tell us what everyone believed. The method is to read them as made things: negotiated, circulated, read variously, and preserved unevenly. Used with care, they open aspects of daily life—fashion, food, hygiene, work, family, and leisure—that other records often ignore. The past they reveal is not a transparent window but a shopwindow: arranged to persuade, yet still full of evidence for the historian.