Yesteryear's Wonderlands : Introducing Modernism to America

"Yesteryear's Wonderlands" presents a multimedia experience on CD-ROM of enchanting spectacles from the heyday of North American amusement parks.

It recreates the sights and sounds of the park with a wide range of visual material, including over one thousand color postcards, short movies, and magazine articles, as well as the piano music that contributed so much to the parks' atmosphere of excitement.

Between 1900 and 1915, amusement parks across North America taught people - young and old, men and women, white and black - about new technologies and gave them their first tastes of the urban modernism that would eventually come to dominate the country.

Technology today makes it possible for Yesteryear's Wonderlands to integrate fields such as cinema studies, popular culture studies, and cultural and social history, by inviting users to interactively engage with primary historical evidence for themselves.

In addition to scholarly essays that aid in making sense of the vast amount of rare material, this package also includes a scrapbook that enables the user to make original, illustrated lectures from the archival material. Screen shots, illustrations, and more information can be found at our associated website.

Lauren Rabinovitz, chair of American studies and professor of American studies & cinema at the University of Iowa, is the author of "Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema" and "Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture".

She coauthored the CD-ROM interactive book "The Rebecca Project with Greg Easley".

From 1988-98, Easley developed multimedia software at the University of Iowa, and won national software design awards for The Virtual Hospital.

Marty Christensen is partnered with Goyo Interactive and has worked for over 8 years in educational software development.