The talk, which is scheduled for 7 p.m., will be held at the Wilmington Community Center, 7 Community Center Circle, just off Springfield Road. It is free to attend. Refreshments will be provided by Up-A-Creek Restaurant in Wilmington. For more information, contact the Wilmington Historical Society at whs12997@hotmail.com or 518-420-8370.

Changing people’s interpretations of the wild through rebranding the American wilderness would require changing attitudes. For most early 19th-century Americans, the idea of experiencing wilderness was frightening. Postcards, along with more available transportation and comfortable accommodations, played a role in changing the minds of the rising middle class and introduced them to wilderness tourism, according to the historical society. In turn, a new American identity was born.

Amodeo is the coordinator at the Kelly Adirondack Center of Union College. In the college’s Adirondack Research Library, she has encouraged and facilitated research by faculty, students and the community since 2013. The collections at the ARL focus on the grassroots environmental movements that, figuratively and literally, shaped the Adirondack Park.

“What has made such an impression on me, scanning over 1,200 postcards as a part of a digitization project in the Adirondack Research Library at the Kelly Adirondack Center of Union College, is how inextricably linked Adirondack tourists’ experiences are with American identity,” Amodeo said. “Tourism also created a market for depictions of American scenes. When they left, like so many museum shop customers, they sought to take an affordable piece of this experience home with them and share it with friends and family. What collectors of these postcards created was a portfolio of this new brand — this American wilderness tourists’ experience.”