Early Panoramas.

Invented in Edinburgh in 1787 by Robert Barker, panoramas—an early version of "motion pictures"—became a popular form of entertainment in nineteenth-century America. In the first panorama theaters viewers entered a darkened corridor, then climbed a flight of stairs to arrive at a raised platform in the center of a large exhibition space. Surrounding the viewer was a detailed, brightly lit, 360-degree landscape scene, perhaps of Naples, London, or Niagara Falls. The audience could read about the scene in an accompanying pamphlet that explained important details and figures. One patron, writing in the New York Mirror, found the illusion "so complete" that "the spectator might be justified in forgetting his locality, and imagining himself transposed to a scene of tangible realities!" The first American exhibition of a panorama, a view of Westminster and London painted by the English artist William Winstanley, was...