Description: Through innovative readings of travelogues and other nonfiction films exhibited in the United States between 1907 and 1915, Jennifer Lynn Peterson offers new insights into the aesthetic and commercial history of early cinema.
Review Quotes: "Jennifer Lynn Peterson brings an imaginative scholarship to a much-needed study of a genre pervasive in popular cinema of its time yet unjustly ignored by film historians as presumably mundane. Education in the School of Dreams reveals that travelogues still have much to teach us about how the world was perceived and visually reproduced in the early decades of cinema. Peterson shows how such films not only deal with travel per se, but engage significant concepts, including nature, aesthetics, transportation, modernity, and popular and formal education. Peterson's research is both deep and broad, offering a truly impressive examination of hundreds of movies demanding our reconsideration."--Dan Streible, author of Learning with the Lights Off: A Reader in Educational Film