The Vault is Slate’s history blog. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter @slatevault, and find us on Tumblr. Find out more about what this space is all about here. These brightly colored postcards ...

If we can learn anything from these 1900s French postcards predicting what 2000 would look like, it's that our imagination is a lot cooler than reality. Sure, a lot has changed in the last century.

French Postcards rings both comic and true. The believable, fresh-faced characters are young naives from American colleges spending their French-English dictionaries, they compulsively seek out ...