The First Panoramas is a cultural history of the first three decades of the panorama, a three-hundred-sixty-degree visual medium patented by the British artist Robert Barker in 1787. "During the last decade the new field of panorama studies has achieved a great deal, though many accounts of this important and elusive form of visual representation are still marked by misleading generalizations. Denise Blake Oleksijczuk's impressive The First Panoramas carries panorama research to a new level of material and historical specificity. Clearly it is a work that will be indispensable for anyone studying this topic and readers will be rewarded by its exemplary combination of archival investigation and theoretical reflection." - Jonathan Crary.