While such scholars as Rick Altman, Lauren Rabinovitz, and Tom Gunning have established how cinema served as an alluring means of virtual travel for American audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what is less known is how film companies expanded on this practice in the years that immediately followed. Filmmakers created a product for which exhibitors, reformers, and educators had high hopes to elevate cinema's cultural status and financial viability. Jennifer Lynn Peterson's rigorously researched and creatively argued Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film traces the emergence of the travelogue as a commercial form of “instructive entertainment” during cinema's transitional era (1907–15), the time between the institutionalization of the nickelodeon and the wide proliferation of multi-reel fiction around World War I.

Not easily defined by a sole technique or a chosen object, the travelogue consisted of a collection of views cohering around a geographic location, in turn capturing a place along with a particular way of looking at that place (53–61). As Peterson argues, travelogues were deeply connected to the pervasive Western imperialism of the era, a connection linking the films and the companies that produced them to the expansionist agendas of the countries in which the films were conceived and manufactured. Without ignoring the ideological messages interwoven into these productions, Education in the School of Dreams also posits alternative analytic frameworks. The travelogue's nonnarrative, short-format structure, combined with the fact that commercial exhibition most often excluded the presence of a commentator, allowed for and even facilitated multiple kinds of viewing experience. In one of the most provocative claims of the book, Peterson suggests that travelogues inspired “poetic reverie,” opportunities for viewers to “experience a series of free-floating, subjective associations” that had more to do with dreaming and desire than with the streamlined ingestion of information (230–33).

Accounting for the production of travelogues as a global phenomenon, with French companies such as Pathé and Gaumont leading the way, Peterson focusses her study on American exhibition. The monograph thus offers a welcome contribution to historiography on the international production and local reception of film during this period as well as opening a space for more comparative projects. Education in the School of Dreams also shows how the travelogue not only was significant to the growth of the film industry, but functioned as a major antecedent to the ethnographic films of Robert Flaherty and others in the 1920s. Building on the work of Alison Griffiths, Raymond Fielding, Charles Musser, and Kristin Whissel, along with the recent expansive anthologies on instructional cinema, Peterson explores the rich discourse around nonfiction film before what is often written about as the beginnings of “documentary.”

Peterson examines the travelogue from different angles over seven chapters. Chapter 1 focusses on Burton Holmes, whose multimedia travel lectures on North and South America and Asia both influenced and were quite separate from the travelogue. Holmes's live expository accompaniment and emphasis on his own role as guide, leading the audience on a tour of interlinked images, were notably absent in the emerging travelogue form. Chapter 2 looks at travelogues' smooth integration into the split-reel variety format of American film exhibition during the early to mid-1910s, as well as the genre's ultimate failure to prove its financial value within the marketplace. Chapter 3 investigates the attempt by reformers and industry insiders to use the travelogue to “uplift” the cultural status of cinema and, in turn, advocate for cinema's social role to teach mass urban populations. Peterson clearly shows how Chicago-based distributor George Kleine was an important booster of educational films. However, the text does not detail what Kleine thought films did to audiences, and how they led to specific kinds of knowledge or critical thinking skills. Chapter 4 analyzes how travelogues such as Moroccan Shoemakers (Pathé, c.1915) classified and hierarchized individuals along the lines of geographically and racially based “types.” Still, other films, including Venice and Its Monuments (Éclair, 1914) and In Egypt (Pathé, c.1920), destabilized and even challenged the controlling view of the travelogue through the subjects' direct engagement with the camera and through the film revealing the process of its own construction. Chapter 5 traces the eighteenth-century origins and twentieth-century transformation of the “picturesque” and its impact on the ways travelogues framed pleasant views of places through techniques such as staging in depth.

Chapter 6 presents a speculative but highly convincing account of how travelogues offered aesthetic experiences that may have been liberating but also misleading for viewers. The intricate blend of critical theory with literature and newspaper accounts makes this chapter the most compelling in the monograph. The concluding chapter investigates representations of the American West, films that relished in the spectacular yet ultimately domesticated qualities of the western landscape and spotlighted the growing urbanization of cities such as Denver and Los Angeles. This section would have been stronger if there had been more discussion of those political interests that shaped the look and life of the West. These would include such prominent national figures such as Theodore Roosevelt – one of the most outspoken promoters of violence and preservation, expansion and conservation, visceral experience and the cinematic portrayal of that experience.

Peterson asserts throughout the book that although travelogues receded from prominence around 1915, their presence was certainly felt within post-World War I exhibition practices and they anticipated the rise of ethnographic filmmaking as well as the avant-garde craft of individuals like Oskar Fischinger; however, the jump to the 1920s makes one wonder about the intervening years. Given Woodrow Wilson and his administration's enthusiastic mobilization of cinema for the war effort, and their interest in pedagogical uses of media more generally, how did wartime depictions of troops in training, armaments, scenes of combat, and battlefields draw on prewar travelogues and then inflect their postwar afterlife? This question constitutes a future area of research for scholars rather than a section missing from Education in the School of Dreams. For one of the major strengths of the monograph is how it encourages additional projects that explore nonfiction film's shifting position within a broader cultural and political context.