Greetings from Yesteryear

As a culinary historian, Jessica B. Harris has traveled the world researching the African diaspora that informs her writing and cookbooks. Along the way, she’s become a deltiologist—a postcard collector—scouring flea markets, bookstores, and auctions, particularly for ones that illuminate the everyday lives of the people affected by that forced dispersion, from Africa to the Caribbean to the South. In her new coffee-table book, Vintage Postcards from the African World: In the Dignity of Their Work and the Joy of Their Play (University Press of Mississippi), Harris shares more than 150 of those images. “Many of these people had newly emerged from enslavement,” she says. “Dignity was important to them, and it’s important to see that.” Here, Harris reveals what drew her to ten of the postcards.