In 1873 Mark Twain patented a scrapbook with pages coated with mucilage – the popular genre was in blossom offering a variety of forms. At present, scholars tend to neglect the phenomenon, even though it might inform a number of modern methods of cultural analysis, e.g. New Historicism. The scrapbook offers a unique insight into mass culture, revealing the context through individual examples (and not only female ones). Rooted in ancient Greek koinoi topoi (memory aids), having passed by the long way to hi-tech Internet technologies (homepages), the scrapbook has played an important role in education, as well as in self-identification.

Compilers of The Scrapbook in American Life, known researchers in American history and culture, make an important effort to place the scrapbook within the historic tradition. They preface the volume with an introduction to the theory of the genre, which reveals deep, as well as extensive, research and analysis and considers the scrapbook as a separate domain of American culture studies. This vision of the scrapbook reveals interesting interconnections, such as the scrapbook as a prototype of the twentieth-century art methods of collage and montage.

The two sections of the collection focus on the two larger categories: “Manuscripts of Learning and Knowing” and “Books of the Self.” The first section covers the scrapbook's social function – that of transferring knowledge and educating. Thus Patricia P. Bucker discovers an American girl's perception of the Mexican War (1846–48) through the collection of its tokens in her scrapbook. Here the scrapbook appears as the girl's way of social self-realization and participation in a society offering limited opportunities for women. The article by Melissa A. Johnson focusses on the Weimar era and the perception of Americanization by a German artist, whose scrapbook enchantingly reflects not only her vision of the mythologized America and its impact, but also the woman's sheer pleasure in materials of pop culture. The second part of the book focusses on the compilers' private selves. Thus Carel Bowel analyzes the intricate dual personality of a prostitute through her scrapbook, James Kelley deals with the scrapbooks of the mothers of Ernest Hemingway and Christopher Isherwood, mediating the famous sons' selves and so on.

No doubt, scrapbooks cannot be interpreted definitively – appearing as intertext, they signify a set of values attributed by their compilers to products of mass culture. Nevertheless, collections of ephemera, short-lived by definition, prove to be surprisingly enduring and offer unique opportunities for visualizing epochs of the past, of which all articles in The Scrapbook in American Life are bright evidence.