Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon
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    • Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon
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    • Cindy Ott
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    • Acknowledgments
  • Online Exhibition
    • Just Another Squash: 12,000 BCE to 1600
    • From Pumpkin Beer to Pumpkin Pie: 1600 to 1799
    • The Making of a Rural New England Icon: 1800 to 1860
    • The Pumpkin and the Nation: 1861 to 1899
    • Americans Celebrate the Fall Harvest with Pumpkins: 1900 to 1945
    • The Changing Nature of Pumpkins: 1946 to the Present
    • The Changing Nature of American Rural Economies: 1946 to the Present
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Picture
“Halloween,” color postcard, ca. 1910s. Author’s private collection.

 Playing with Mischievous Pumpkins

Most jack-o’-lantern figures from the first half of the twentieth century were more sinister than the sweet and cuddly cartoon characters common today.  Like the jack-o’-lantern in this postcard, it usually had a macabre head  attached to a body that moved about to wreck havoc on those in its path. As the personification of wild nature, it was full of vim and vigor, not comfort. 

 

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