During the first decade of the nineteenth century, Americans embraced the creation of silhouettes by the "physiognotrace," a portable instrument that enabled sitters to trace and inexpensively reproduce their own profiles. This paper considers how these machine-produced portraits introduced changes in the aesthetics of "likeness," addressed concerns about the nature of truth in visual representation, and resonated with the democratic values of Jeffersonian America. 

The phonograph is one of those rare, Jekyll-and-Hyde devices that was invented for one thing and ended up doing something completely different. The purpose of the present paper is to account as "thickly" as possible for the appropriation of the phonograph as a home entertainment device in the mid-1890s. I begin by drawing a comparison between the phonograph and another contemporary medium, the mass circulation monthly magazine; I will then address the definition of the phonograph within and against existing discourses surrounding Woman, music, and home in American life; and I conclude by alluding to the ways in which the norms and habits of shopping helped to define the home phonograph.