Object Lessons

Call for Speakers Symposium: Reaching and Teaching Through Material Culture

2012-02-16T14:09:00.001-05:00

On September 28-29, 2012, a symposium at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library will mark the 60th anniversary of Winterthur/University of Delaware graduate education. Speakers are not limited to Winterthur graduates and
will address the following topics:

* What to Collect & How to Maintain: Availability, Acquisition,Responsibility

* Technology and Accessing Collections

* Balancing Intellectual Relevance with Popular Interest

* The Role of Cultural Heritage Professionals in World Events.

The symposium will present subjects relevant to material culture and conservation. Speakers may be alumni of the Winterthur Program in American
Material Culture, the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (est. 1974), and from other institutions and programs.

The symposium structure will explore the topics through five-minute lightening rounds, twenty- to thirty-minute presentations, and discussion
with speaker panels. Please review the more detailed information on each topic in the complete Call at http://www.sowf.org/symposium2012.html.

Scholars and independent consultants, museum and allied professionals, and conservators are invited to submit a 100- to 200-word abstract for their proposed topic. Proposals are due February 27th for review by the Winterthur Fellows board; announcements will be made by March 19th. Please send abstracts via email to info@sowf.org. For general information about
the symposium, please visit http://www.sowf.org/symposium2012.
http://www.sowf.org/symposium2012>.

In addition, to highlight a broad spectrum of accomplishments in the
related fields, a silent “slide show” will present relevant institutional
and individual projects either underway or completed. All are invited to
apply by providing one digital image of yourself or your
institution/project/publication, etc., with up to five bullet points
outlining the goals/successes. Topics can relate to various aspects of
cultural management, including fundraising, institutional expansion, actual
or virtual exhibitions and public programs, art conservation, advocacy,
publication, and more. Please send submissions to the contact information
above by August 3rd, 2012.

Thank you,

Society of Winterthur Fellows Board

The symposium is sponsored by the Society of Winterthur Fellows

Rosemary T. Krill
Academic Programs
Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library
E-mail: rkrill@winterthur.org

winterthur.org

CFP: Texts and Textiles

2012-02-13T08:38:00.000-05:00

A conference organised by the Centre for Material Texts
to be held 11-12 September 2012 at Jesus College, Cambridge

The shared origin of text and textile in the Latin texere, to weave, is a critical commonplace. Many of the terms we use to describe our interactions with words are derived from this common linguistic root, and numerous other expressions associated with reading and writing are drawn from the rich vocabulary of cloth. Textiles are one of the most ubiquitous components of material culture, and they are also integral to the material history of texts. Paper was originally made from cotton rags, and in many different cultural and historical settings texts come covered, wrapped, bound, or decorated with textiles. And across the domestic, public, religious, and political spheres, textiles are often the material forms in which texts are produced, consumed, and circulated.

In the light of the CMT’s current research theme on ‘the material text in material culture’, we invite papers which consider any of the many dimensions of the relationship between texts and textiles. There are no historical, geographical, or disciplinary limitations. Areas to be addressed could include:

the shared language of texts and textiles

construction and deconstruction: to weave, spin, stitch, knit, stitch, suture, tie up or together, piece, tailor, gather, fashion, fabricate, mesh, trim, stretch, wrap, unfold, unpic
challenges and problem-solving: knots, tangles, holes; to lose the thread, iron out creases, unravel, cut, keep on tenterhooks
pieces and fragments: rags, patches, patchwork, scraps, strands, threads, rhapsodies, patterns, seams, loose ends, layers

the stuff of books

bookbindings and covers
incunabula – ‘swaddling clothes’
medieval girdle books, book chemises
paper and paper-making
cutting, sewing, and stitching in and on books
scrapbooks, albums, collages
book ribbons and bookmarks
carpet pages
textiles in illustrations, frontispieces, title pages

textile texts

needlework and words: tapestry, embroidery, samplers, quilts, hangings, carpets, banners
the needle and the pen
printed textiles
sacred/religious texts and textiles
love-tokens, keepsakes, charms, and relics
cushions, badges, handkerchiefs, flags, scarves, uniforms, livery and other textual/textile ephemera
professional and amateur work
relationships and networks of gifts, patronage, exchange
pattern books, sample books, costume books

Proposals of up to 250 words for 20-minute papers should be sent to Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk) and Lucy Razzall (lmfr2@cam.ac.uk) by 30 April 2012

CFP: "Objects in Motion," Material Culture Review

2012-01-14T10:55:00.000-05:00

Call For Papers: "Objects in Motion"

Material Culture Review (MCR) invites contributions to its special issue "Objects in Motion," which takes up the 2011-2012 theme of Yale University's Material Culture Study Group. A forum for scholars to engage with artifacts, ideas and methodologies, Yale's Material Culture Study Group is currently exploring the ways that the movement, dispersion, renewal or adaptation of cultural objects shapes our relationships with material and social practices. Movement, in this sense, is not confined to a set of prescribed spatial parameters; some objects of focus traverse transnational boundaries (as is the case within today's globalized economy) while others are examined for their movement between or within local contexts. Some are designed or adapted for portability inside the domestic sphere. Extending this dialogue, we invite a broad range of papers that consider how objects accrue cultural meaning through their mobility.

Topics may include, but are not restricted to the following themes:

- Accumulation / circulation of objects within private or institutional collections
- Cultures of repurposing, re-using or "up-cycling" goods
- Histories of Design and Decorative Arts as they relate to mobility
- Impact of commodity flows on localized cultures
- Architectural adaptations, renovations and revitalizations
- Dissemination of knowledge through print cultures
- Cross-cultural material exchange / encounter
- Circulation of knowledge through intangible cultural heritage
- Social impacts of transportation technologies
- Souvenirs and cultural tourism

Contributors from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds are invited to submit articles, research reports or exhibition reviews that address the theme of "Objects in Motion."

The deadline for an expression of interest, consisting of a 300-word abstract and CV, is January 31, 2012. Completed work will be due April 15, 2012. Information about formatting and submission can be found at: http://culture.cbu.ca/mcr/submissions.html

Material Culture Review is distributed to over 250 universities, libraries, research institutions and museums in 15 countries. MCR seeks to provide a venue for refereed articles and reports encompassing a range of approaches to interpret culture through an analysis of people’s relationships with their material world. For more information, please visit: http://culture.cbu.ca/mcr

CFP: Nation Building: Craft and Contemporary American Culture, November 8-9, 2012, Renwick Gallery, Washington, DC

2012-01-14T10:53:00.000-05:00

CALL FOR PAPERS

Renwick Gallery Symposium:
Nation Building: Craft and Contemporary American Culture

November 8-9, 2012
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Paper submissions from senior and emerging scholars are invited for this symposium, which will examine craft’s increasingly urgent role within contemporary American culture. Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the Renwick Gallery, American Art’s branch museum for contemporary craft and decorative arts, this program seeks to broaden the dialogue surrounding craft’s recent histories, and to articulate rapid changes to the field since the advent of the current century.

Scholarship is invited that complicates our understanding of modern craft as a response to mass culture, and that probes the evolution of the field beyond the studio movement. Investigations of post-studio practice, craft education, “craftivism,” DIY (Do-It-Yourself) and Slow movements, converging practices in craft, design, and contemporary art, and shifting attitudes towards technology, skill, and materiality are welcome. How making engages gender, identity, class, politics, economics, the environment, and everyday life are also possible subjects of inquiry. The title of this symposium references modern craft’s history as a regenerative (and often political) force in society, but also Hannah Arendt’s assertion that what fundamentally distinguishes us as a species is our capacity for “world-building.” The value of craft as evidence of diverse human agency is at the heart of this project. Ultimately, this program seeks a pluralist view of craft’s impact on the contemporary American experience.

Please email a two-page, double-spaced abstract (300-500 words) and short C.V. to Nicholas R. Bell, the Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator of American Craft and Decorative Art at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum at CraftSymposium@si.edu

Proposals must be received by April 2, 2012. Confirmed speakers will be required to submit the text of their 20-minute symposium presentations by October 8, 2012. A final text of the essay with endnotes will be due January 2, 2013, for possible publication in the symposium proceedings. The symposium will be available for viewing in a simultaneous and, later, an archived webcast.

CFP: Color, Commerce, and Consumption in Global Historical Perspective, German Historical Institute, June 21-23, 2012

2012-01-14T10:51:00.001-05:00

Color, Commerce, and Consumption in Global Historical Perspective

Conference at the GHI
June 21 - 23, 2012
Convener: Regina Lee Blaszczyk

Call for Papers

Historians of business, technology, and industry have examined the role of the nineteenth-century German chemical industry in revolutionizing the production of dyes, paints, and pigments. We know a good deal about chemists, R&D directors, and managers in the global chemical industry, but we know less about how their color inventions and innovations had an impact on markets, product design, and consumer culture during the great industrial era that stretched from the 1850s through the 1970s.

This workshop seeks to attract scholars in various disciplines (including history, anthropology, art history, design history, sociology, and cultural studies) whose original research on broad historical topics (e.g., the history of marketing, the history of international business, the history scientific knowledge) touches on the history of color in some way. We hope to assemble a diverse group of scholars for an interdisciplinary dialogue that makes sense of the global history of color, consumption, and commerce in the 19th and 20th centuries. We welcome contributions from university scholars, museum curators, librarians and archivists, and independent researchers. We are particularly interested in papers that make innovative use of historical primary sources, such as corporate archives, trade and industry journals, import-export data, designers' diaries, notebooks, and correspondence, and advertising and marketing ephemera.

We welcome proposals on a range of topics, but are especially interested in new research about color as it relates to three major historical themes: markets and management, product design and development, and consumer culture.

Papers dealing with color, markets, and management might take some of the following approaches: Histories of the use of color in retailing, advertising, graphic design, and corporate branding; histories of marketing practice by the global chemical industry with regard to dyes, paints, varnishes, plastics, and pigments; studies of organizational, corporate, or individual efforts to standardize colors and to create color systems for managing the plethora of new color opportunities; the impact of management gurus such as Frederick Winslow Taylor or W. Edwards Deming on color decision makers; the transfer of color management practices and color systems from West to East and vice versa.

Papers on color in product design and development might consider the following topics: Discussions of how architects, interior designers, industrial designers, and fashion designers have used color in design, branding, and marketing; the impact of camouflage techniques on commercial color practice; the effects of new media technologies (e.g., chromolithography, television) on color practice in graphic design, advertising, packaging, and corporate identity.

Topics on color and consumer culture might include: Studies of how consumers have used color to engage or challenge mainstream discourses about commerce and consumption in interior decoration and fashion; debates over color pedagogy, taste, and visual perception; discussions of how consumers have used color to construct sub-cultural styles or discourses (e.g. Arts and Crafts, street styles); historical analyses of consumer responses to color in architecture, in trade shows, and at world's fairs; discussions of the cultural and symbolic meaning of color in relation to gender, class, ethnicity, and local, regional, or national identities.

Please send a paper title, a one-page abstract, and a one-page CV (preferably in pdf format) to Susanne Fabricius by February 15, 2012. Applicants will be notified by March 1, 2012. Workshop participants will be asked to circulate papers to fellow participants prior to the event. The workshop will consist of a keynote address on the first evening and two days of individual paper summaries and discussions. Expenses for travel (economy class) and accommodations in Washington will be covered, although we also encourage participants to defray travel costs with funds from their home institutions if possible.

CFP: Material Matters, Tenth Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars, 14 April 2012

2011-11-03T11:17:00.002-04:00

Material Matters
Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library
Saturday, April 14, 2012

The Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware invites submissions for papers to be given at the Tenth Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars.

Focus: Object-based research has the potential to expand and even reinvent our understanding of culture and history. In honor of the tenth anniversary of the MCSES, we seek a broad range of papers from emerging material culture scholars. Whether exploring the latest theories, viewing existing material through a new lens, or reinterpreting standing historical conversations with an object-based focus, proposed papers should exemplify the possibilities in material culture research. In exploring these material matters, we hope to promote an interdisciplinary discussion on the state of material culture studies today.

Disciplines represented at past symposia include American studies, anthropology, archaeology, consumer studies, English, gender studies, history, museum studies and the histories of art, architecture, design and technology. We welcome proposals from graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and those just beginning their teaching or professional careers.

Format: The symposium will consist of nine presentations divided into three panels. Each presentation is limited to twenty minutes, and each panel is followed by comments from established scholars in the field. There will be two morning sessions and one afternoon session, with breaks for discussion following each session and during lunch. Participants will also have the opportunity to tour Winterthur's unparalleled collection of early American decorative arts and to engage in a roundtable discussion on Friday, April 13. Travel grants of up to $300 will be available for presenters.

Submissions: The proposal should be no more than 300 words and should clearly indicate the focus of your object-based research, the critical approach you take toward that research, and the significance of your research beyond the academy. While the audience for the symposium consists mainly of university and college faculty and graduate students, we encourage broader participation. In evaluating proposals, we will give preference to those papers that keep a more diverse audience in mind.

Send your proposal, with a current c.v. of no more than two pages, to emerging.scholars@gmail.com.

Deadline: Proposals must be received by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, November 16, 2011. Speakers will be notified of the vetting committee's decision in January 2012.

Confirmed speakers will be asked to provide symposium speakers with digital images for use in publicity and are required to submit a final draft of their papers by March 5, 2012.

2012 Emerging Scholars Co-Chairs
Nalleli Guillen, Alison Kreitzer & Anne Reilly
Department of History, American Civilization Program
University of Delaware

Objects in Revolt: April 16, 2011

2011-04-10T17:55:00.002-04:00

Always worth it. Program is here.

Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars

Presented by the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware and Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, Winterthur, Delaware

Objects in Revolt
Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library
Saturday, April 16, 2011

This annual symposium, organized entirely by University of Delaware graduate students, provides emerging scholars—graduate students and recent PhDs from a variety of academic disciplines as well as museum professionals—with a venue for interdisciplinary conversations centering on material culture. We encourage discussion across perceived boundaries of discipline, medium, and methodology; past symposia have included scholars and professionals from such fields as anthropology, art history, historical archeology, history, and American studies. Each fall, we welcome paper proposals from graduate students and professionals early in their careers on any topic related to material culture. Please see the Call for Proposals for compete details.

At the conference, distinguished scholars provide comments on the papers and lead discussion sessions. Participants also have the opportunity to participate in roundtable discussions and special tours of Winterthur’s collections with graduate students in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, including tours of the Winterthur library and conservation labs.

Online registration begins in March. This symposium is free and open to the public.

For more information, contact:

2011 Emerging Scholars Co-chairs
Virginia Garnett, Department of English
Theodore Triandos, Department of Art History
Alessandra Wood, Department of History, American Civilization
University of Delaware

emerging.scholars@gmail.com

Tangible Things, Harvard University, January 24-May 29, 2011

2011-03-13T10:43:00.002-04:00

“Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?”–Henry David Thoreau

Tangible Things highlights and questions the modern Western intellectual categories that distinguish art from artifact, specimen from tool, and the historical from the anthropological in Harvard’s unparalleled museum and archival collections. The exhibition features nearly two hundred intriguing objects from across the University. Images are available upon request. Visitors begin in an orienting exhibition located in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. There they are introduced to established ways of organizing tangible things and are challenged to classify a seemingly random assortment of objects according to these scholarly conventions. Where in the University do items like John Singer Sargent’s palette, the dress and beads of a Camp Fire Girl, a crystal ball, or a stuffed Bengal tiger belong? How about a century-old tortilla or the University’s President’s Chair? Where should they belong? Why? Armed with these questions visitors are invited to take part in a University-wide scavenger hunt to discover the many guest objects carefully inserted into the exhibitions of seven of Harvard’s public museums. As visitors fan out to discover these wandering items they will begin to realize that the meanings of things and the categories of knowledge and knowing based on those things are not as static or as natural as they may appear.

Tangible Things provides an excellent introduction to modes of classifying material things at Harvard and to the diverse things cared for in Harvard’s nearly fifty distinct collections. It also serves as the foundation for the innovative General Education course “Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History” (Spring 2011).

Curated by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor, Department of History; and Ivan Gaskell, Margaret S. Winthrop Curator and Senior Lecturer on History; with Sara Schechner, David P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments; and Sarah Anne Carter, Lecturer on History and Literature. Organized by the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.

For more information: http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/exhibitions/offsite/detail.dot?id=32778

Keeping It Real: Period Rooms as School Rooms

2010-09-11T09:46:00.002-04:00

For those colleagues teaching material culture this fall: The New York Times's online commentary feature, "Living Rooms," features University of Pennsylvania scholar Joan DeJean on the power of museum period rooms to contain and convey stories, "both stylistic and personal."

DeJean reviews the history--and thus changes--to this 1735 lavish room from the Château de Draveil now installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The material culture of the space has been moved, separated, and imitated, but the installation still strikes visitors. One schoolchild remarked, "I like walking where other people have walked and thinking about the people who walked there before me."

Amen.

Object Lab at the Chipstone Foundation

2009-09-27T18:21:00.002-04:00

Teaching material culture is difficult. Really. I've taught it for more years than I care to admit. And there has been a real shift in the way undergraduates (and some graduate students) experience the real. Example: the number of students who think it's okay to analyze a picture of an object (despite class discussion and handouts requiring measurement, inspection, etc., of the real thing) is rising. The sort of discriminating literacy related to precise word choice and exacting description once taught in elementary and high school seems to have been left for dead. My students now assume, for example, that any book is a novel. This is especially discouraging when the assignment is an analysis of Thomas Paine's Common Sense. (The butler didn't do it, the boy didn't get the girl, and the girl wasn't saved in the last chapter.)

Yet this lack of engagement with the physical world and its social organization and cultural/intellectual classification may also be due to the fact that students aren't asked to engage. Many courses in material culture are taught with texts, photos, and slides (now PowerPointed for your viewing pleasure). What's so exciting about material culture studies is its connection with experience (the senses) but also with the object's "place-ness"--that is, how an aesthetic or historic object is both apprehended and interpreted. Making sense of objects requires the the physical senses and sensibility--keen intellectual perception. It's the sort of creativity that goes beyond rote memorization of objects and makers and schools and technologies and gets to imagining new ways of understanding the past.

Consider, then, what's happening at the Chipstone Foundation in Wisconsin. Take a look at the objectlab's channel on YouTube. Here's the description:

These are highlights from one of a series of object study exercises that were held during Object Lab 1.1 at the Chipstone Foundation (www.chipstone.org) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in June of 2009. Nine talented undergraduates were in attendance from a variety of schools and many different disciplines--art history, history, studio art, industrial design, geography, and architecture. The overall goal of this intensive material culture program was to explore innovative ways to think about and look at old things.

The Design Exercise specifically asked the students to come up with a display and interpretation strategy for a single object. Three groups competed against one another to see which could come up with the most lucid and creative approach in one afternoon. At the end of the session the students and several invited scholars together critiqued the proposals.

Simple, purposeful, engaging, productive. Real learning.

CFP: Things in Common: Fostering Material Culture Pedagogy

2009-08-22T12:39:00.004-04:00

The guest editors of this special issue of Winterthur Portfolio invite essays that engage object-based teaching and interpretation strategies in a variety of sites, including the secondary and college classroom, the museum gallery, the collection, the historic site, the national park, the archaeological dig, the library, the archive, and the World Wide Web.

Since 1974, when E. McClung Fleming published "Artifact Study: A Proposed Model" (consistently one of the most frequently downloaded articles from Winterthur Portfolio), scholars across the disciplines have engaged the art and mystery of teaching the material worlds of the past and the present. In this current revisiting of the topic, we seek essays that examine the interplay between new research and strategies for teaching and intepreting the results of that research. For example, how does recent work in such fields as book history, transnational studies, diaspora studies, or design studies and design history affect what is taught now and how? What is the impact of the new emphasis in material culture studies on such topics as the materialization of memory, the nature of fakes and forgeries, the history of collection and collection policies, the marketplace for artifacts? How do we interpret and teach politicized objects? What are the ethical implications of teaching material culture in a time of environmental consciousness and economic downturn? How can museums enhance, with new technologies or innovative exhibit design, the educational experience of new audiences brought in by cultural tourism?

The essay may be an extended analysis of one of these suggested topics or another topic of the author's choice. It may also be a shorter description of a specific object-based project or assignment or a case study of an object-based approach. In addition, offers to review pertinent new books in the field will be welcome.

Dissertation students as well as scholars and practitioners at any stage of their professional career are invited to submit a brief expression of interest to the guest editors. This should outline the topic and approach and be accompanied by a short biographical statement about the proposer. Final essays will be subject to the journal's peer review process.

Deadlines:

15 October 2009: Expressions of interest due to the editors via email

15 November 2009: Response from the editors

15 March 2010: Draft manuscripts due to the editors

For more information:

Shirley Wajda, stwajda@neo.rr.com

Debby Andrews, dandrews@udel.edu

It's Open: "The Kokoon Arts Club: Cleveland Revels!", Kent State University Museum, 19 March 2009

2009-03-19T10:36:00.007-04:00

“As the lowly cocoon was the forerunner of the beautiful butterfly, so might they hope that from this small beginning something of beauty should develop and emerge.”

--1931 Kokoon Arts Club Narrative and Roster

The Kokoon Arts Club of Cleveland, Ohio, was founded in 1911 by a small group of commercial artists employed at the Otis Lithograph Company. Meeting first at night in a vacant tailor’s shop, the Club’s founding members pledged themselves to explore the “New Art.” This they did, with gusto and paint.

Club members collaborated to study and make art distinctive from their commercial work, look for display venues and embrace modernism not only as a distinctive form of art but as a way of life. Through a full calendar of members’ shows, sketching excursions, auctions, lectures, theater and musical productions and classes, the Kokoon Arts Club became a fixture of Cleveland’s arts scene throughout the 1910s and 1920s. To fund their activities and pay the mortgage, the Kokooners in 1913 inaugurated an annual bal masque, a bohemian revel that by the 1920s attracted thousands of free-spirited Clevelanders.

The exhibition, curated by Shirley Teresa Wajda, will display the posters and costumes designed and worn by members and guests at these bohemian balls. Costume designs were based on the artistic and theatrical exploration of other places and times related to the ball’s annual theme. With jazz as the chosen music and a program of stunts, guest performances, and other surprises, these revels lasted well into the morning and were sometimes broadcast over radio.

The Kent State University Museum is open Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4:45 p.m.; Thursday from 10 a.m. to 8:45 p.m.; and Sunday from noon to 4:45 p.m. It is closed on Monday and Tuesday.

The Museum is located in Rockwell Hall on the corner of East Main and South Lincoln Streets on the Kent State University campus. Special guided tours are available for groups by reservation. Free on-site motor coach parking is available.

For additional information about the Kent State University Museum, go to www.kent.edu/museum, or call 330-672-3450.

A Quick Post on Inauguration Souvenirs

2009-01-19T11:20:00.003-05:00

Well, what can one say about the avalanche of collectibles, memorabilia, souvenirs and (just plain ol') tchotchkes that has swept before it good taste and good sense? The United States IS in a recession, after all, and calls for prudent saving and spending are going unheeded as Americans celebrate the historic inauguration of Barack Obama.

Mainstream media and the blogosphere are awash with commentaries and reports about the high and the low, the good and the bad taste displayed in some of the Inauguration souvenirs: from historically inspired silver and pewter inaugural cups (Jefferson had one!) to kitsch-y commemorative plates. See France 24's Obama Inauguration Webpage for a wonderful rundown of the "Top Ten" souvenirs. (My favorite? The hand-drawn Obama Commemorative Paper Plate, signed by "The Artist," for 10 bucks a pop: the best [and well-drawn] parody of the whole memorabilia enterprise, yet a parody with no ill intent at all. Genius.)

I'll leave the issues of taste, collectability, and value aside, and just make this simple observation: people are celebrating. The American people, and many people around the world, are joyous. Spontaneous celebrations on Election Day, crowds at the Lincoln Memorial yesterday, Inaugural parties in homes and public venues tomorrow: it's all about the purchase, in the word's figurative sense, of "obtaining at the cost of something immaterial, as effort, suffering, sacrifice, etc.," that has made buying souvenirs a basic act not merely of commemoration but of sheer happiness and hope after years of struggle. To be sure, there are those that will try to game the market to acquire collectibles as investment; leave them to their folly that repeats the greediness of those Obama's election has refuted. The fact of that matter is that the great consumer demand for Obama stuff means that profiteering collectors cannot make more wealth off of their investments. In this post-Bush world, that's a comforting and righteous thought.

Yes, my politics are showing. What brought me to tears is seeing Pete Seeger and his grandson, Bruce Springsteen, a choir and the audience sing "This Land Is Your Land" on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial yesterday. And Pete chose to use Woody Guthrie's original lyrics.

Work for peace, folks. Its price may be great, but it's the best collectible of them all.

CFP: The Public Lives of Things

2008-11-24T09:10:00.000-05:00

Seventh Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars
Winterthur Museum & Country Estate
Saturday 25 April 2009

The Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware
invites submissions for papers to be given at the Seventh Annual
Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars.

Focus: Supported in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities
grant for public engagement in the humanities, this year's symposium
encourages graduate students and other emerging scholars to submit
papers that align their object-based research with some aspect of its
potential role in society at large. Within that context, we seek
diversity in topics, chronology, and disciplinary approaches. Travel
grants will be available for all presenters. Disciplines represented
at past symposia include American studies, anthropology, archaeology,
consumer studies, English, history, museum studies and the histories
of art, architecture, design and technology.

Format: The symposium will consist of nine presentations divided into
three panels. Each presentation is limited to twenty minutes and each
panel is followed by comments from established scholars in the field.
There will be two morning sessions and one afternoon session, with
breaks for discussion following each session and over lunch.
Participants will also have the opportunity to tour behind the scenes
at Winterthur's unparalleled collection of early American decorative
arts.

Submissions: The proposal should be no more than 300 words and should
clearly indicate the focus of your object-based research, the critical
approach you take toward that research, and the significance of your
research in the wider community. While the audience for the symposium
consists mainly of university and college faculty and graduate
students, we encourage broader participation. In evaluating proposals,
we will give preference to those papers that keep that broader
audience in mind. Send your proposal, along with a current c.v. (no
more than two pages), to emerging.scholars@gmail.com

Deadline: Proposals must be received by 5 pm on Friday, 30 January
2009. Speakers will be notified of the vetting committee's decision
by late February 2009. Confirmed speakers will be asked to provide
symposium organizers with digital images for use in publicity and are
required to submit a final draft of their papers by 16 March 2009.

Website: http://www.udel.edu/materialculture/emerging_scholars.html

Craft at the Crossroads at ASA

2008-10-10T12:47:00.001-04:00

The ASA Material Culture Caucus’s sponsored session will take place on Friday, 17 October 2008, from 12-1:45 PM, at the Albuquerque Convention Center/Jemez.

This roundtable discussion will interrogate ideas around craft and material culture, especially notions of how craft and exchange intersect. Craft requires special skills to produce useful goods. Needlecrafts (knitting, spinning, weaving, embroidery), pottery, jewelry-making, and related cultural products are included in this panel. The notion of exchange is open-ended—as an exchange of money, goods, or ideas. What kinds of trade and exchanges are enabled within craft circles? How do historical accounts of the role of craft help to elucidate the current crafting groundswell in America?

Although the panelists have different specialties, defined by interest in gender, region, time period or ethnicity, there are commonalities. Woven throughout the panelists’ interests are issues of community and of commerce. Although one might imagine a solitary artisan producing wares purely for the individual creator’s enjoyment, one finds a very different tableau in America. There have been vibrant crafting communities, both in historical groups (for example, knitters and weavers of the nineteenth century and in the U.S. craft movements of the 1970s) and in the contemporary crafting “underground” (which is quite aboveground in sites like Etsy.com and funky craft magazines). How does the idea of community get attached to craft? How do these communities form and what do the members exchange? Furthermore, how do notions of identity inform the creation of communities?

That imaginary artisan producing goods only for her own satisfaction is countered by a reality in which crafters are deeply immersed in commerce, trade, and exchange. In the American southwest, Native crafts have given Native cultures an economic boost even while they may re-inscribe old thought patterns about colonial roles. What are the various kinds of craft markets, and how do craft communities contend with market pressures? How have craft communities in the past and in the present use their art to further cultural and political goals? Finally, how might applications of newer theoretical models help answer questions about the intersection of craft and exchange?

Resources for this roundtable may be found at the Caucus's Craft at the Crossroads Resources page.

CFP: Imaging America: Great Lakes ASA Conference, 19-21 March 2009

2008-09-29T09:48:00.000-04:00

Please note: deadline extended to October 15, 2008:

Papers and session proposals are invited for the conference "Imaging America," a meeting of the Great Lakes American Studies Association (GLASA), which will be held at the University of Notre Dame, March 19-21, 2009.

“Imaging America” evokes themes that are both fundamental to the development of American Studies as a discipline, and representative of some of the most current research in the field. "Images" can refer both to visual or material representations and to the cultural impressions and expectations embodied in texts, oral traditions, or social performance. "America" is a contested term in American Studies, referring alternately to the United States and the Americas. As a theme for our conference, we hope that "Imaging America" will provide an opportunity for scholars and emerging scholars to enter a discussion about the boundaries, both literal and cultural, of America, as well as about the role of images in our analysis of America.

Proposed papers may consider any aspect and interpretation of the theme "Imaging America" including the following:

"America" conceived and defined as a place, land, nation, and people in terms of visual, cultural, and textual images and practices of mapping, naming, and/or cultural geography.

The transnational dimensions of "America" with expanded attention to the "Americas," both north and south.

Stereotypes, competing cultural images of and from minority communities, including those defined by race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, sexuality, ability, region.

The diversity of American religious iconography and images.

The production and cultural use of visual images, e.g. photography, art, advertising, and how new imaging technologies transform national, regional, and individual self-understanding and experience.

The ways in which America is "imaged" during political campaigns, especially the 2008 presidential election.

The roles that American images play in defining national subjectivity and determining who "counts" in the national imaginary.

The emotional and affective dimension of American images and icons, e.g. the flag, the soldier, the West.

Please send 200 word abstracts and c.v. by October 15, 2008 (electronic submission is preferred) to Erika Doss, Chair, Department of American Studies, University of Notre Dame, at: doss.2@nd.edu
Submissions may also be mailed to Sandra M. Gustafson, Department of English University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556.

Participants will be notified of their acceptance by November 1. Graduate students are encouraged to apply; partial funding for conference travel may be available. The annual conference of the Great Lakes American Studies Association will take place at the University of Notre Dame March 19-21, 2009.

Pre(tty) Fab

2008-07-22T09:44:00.002-04:00

When is a prefabricated house a work of art? When it's displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, of course! "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling" opened 19 July and The New York Times loves it. See the newspaper's coverage here and here. And please view the official exhibition Website (momahomedelivery.org) for a history of house design and prefabrication, videos of the houses being built next to the Museum, and other dandy features.

Material History Review: Call for Papers

2008-07-20T23:04:00.000-04:00

Call for Submissions:

Material Culture Review invites submission of new research from the field of
material culture including, cultural history, public history, art history,
geography, archaeology, anthropology, architecture and intangible cultural
heritage. The editors encourage submissions from graduate students and
scholars at any phase of their professional career, professionals and
historians from the art and museum world and from independent scholars with
an interest in material culture.

The editors are currently interested in developing theme issues around the
following topics:
Labour and Material Culture
Religious Material Culture
Needle Work: Knitting, Embroidery and Crocheting
Material Culture of Agriculture
First Nations Material Culture
Intangible Cultural Heritage
Inventorying Culture
Cultural Tourism
The Virtual Museum
Vernacular Architecture

We would welcome expressions of interest in guest editing an issue relating
to any of the aforementioned themes.

MCR is distributed to more than 250 universities, research institutes,
museums and libraries, in thirty countries. Submission information and
guidelines can be found on-line at culture.cbu.ca.

Appel à communications

La Revue de la culture matérielle sollicite des contributions de chercheurs
travaillant à de nouveaux sujets dans le domaine de la culture matérielle,
incluant l’histoire, l’histoire culturelle, l’histoire des institutions,
l’histoire de l’art, la géographie, l’archéologie, l’anthropologie,
l’architecture et le patrimoine culturel immatériel. Les rédacteurs
encouragent les propositions d’articles d’étudiants de troisième cycle et
d’universitaires à toute étape de leur carrière, de professionnels et
d’historiens du monde muséal et artistique, ainsi que de chercheurs
indépendants ayant un intérêt pour la culture matérielle.

Les rédacteurs cherchent actuellement à développer des numéros thématiques
portant sur les sujets suivants :

Culture matérielle et monde du travail
Culture matérielle religieuse
Travaux d’aiguille : Tricot, broderie et crochet
Culture matérielle et agriculture
Culture matérielle des Premières Nations
Patrimoine culturel immatériel
L’inventaire de la culture
Tourisme culturel
Le musée virtuel
Architecture vernaculaire

Nous accueillerons volontiers les propositions des chercheurs désireux de
diriger l’un de ces numéros thématiques susmentionnés à titre de rédacteur
invité.

La Revue de la culture matérielle  est diffusée dans plus de 250
universités, instituts de recherche, musées et bibliothèques, dans trente
pays. Les informations concernant les propositions d’articles et les
instructions aux auteurs sont disponibles sur le site culture.cbu.ca.

Sixth Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars, 12 April 2008

2008-03-31T09:27:00.000-04:00

Material. Culture. Now.

Winterthur Museum & Country Estate

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Organized by graduate students at the University of Delaware, and co-sponsored by the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware and Winterthur Museum & Country Estate, the Sixth Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars, “Material. Culture. Now.” provides students and other emerging scholars with a venue for interdisciplinary dialogue relating to the study of material life and culture. The symposium consists of three panels, each followed by the comments of established scholars in the field of material culture. A keynote address will be given by Shirley Wajda, Assistant Professor of History at Kent State University. The event takes place at Winterthur Museum & Country Estate and participants are invited to attend free tours of the museum’s unparalleled collection of American decorative art, conservation labs, and research library. This year, participants hail from across the United States and Europe, and the topics and methodological approaches that they have chosen suggest the new directions that material culture scholars will follow in the coming years.

TO REGISTER: Please email register.emerging.scholars@gmail.com with your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and areas of interest, as well as what tour you would like to take, if any: General Collection, Furniture, Prints and Paintings, Textiles, Library, or Conservation.

TRAVEL FUNDS: A limited number of grants will be available to help defray the cost of travel. These awards, in amounts up to $100, can only be used for reimbursement of transportation costs (including gas mileage). To apply, please write to us at emerging.scholars@gmail.com with your name, institutional affiliation, and a sentence or two describing your interest in the symposium and the way in which you plan to travel (car, train, etc.). We must receive your application for financial assistance by March 31.

We are pleased to announce that the following speakers will participate in this year’s program:

- Sarah J. Chicone, Museum of the Earth, Ithaca, NY (Paleontological Research Institution): “Reimagining America’s ‘Deserving’: Poverty, Materiality, and the 1913-14 Southern Colorado Coal Strike”

- Jennifer Ferng, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (History, Theory, & Criticism of Architecture and Art): “The Life of Stones: Geology, Aesthetics, and the Excavation of the Material World”

- Eric F. Gollannek, University of Delaware (Art History): “The World I Drank, or Empire in the Punch Bowl”

- Martina Grünewald, University of Applied Arts, Vienna (Design History): “Inalienable Possessions of a Different Sort: On the Fading World of Pawnbroking in Vienna”

- Lynley Herbert, University of Delaware (Art History): “Egyptian Appliqués: Sewing the Seeds of Cultural Revival”

- Sarah Jones, University of Delaware (Winterthur Program in Early American Culture): “‘A Grand and Ceaseless Thoroughfare’: The Social and Cultural Experience of Shopping on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 1820-1860”

- Hillary Kaell, Harvard University (American Studies): “Christian Teens and Biblezines: An Analysis of Revolve: The Complete New Testament”

- Juliette Kristensen, Kingston University, London (History of Design): “A Crafty Woman’s Touch: A Phenomenology of Embroidery, Piano Playing and Typing”

- Rebecca Onion, University of Texas, Austin (American Studies): “Reclaiming the Machine: Steampunk Practice and the Humanization of the Technological Object”

Comments will be given by Michael Prokopow, Adjunct Professor of Design at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto; Jonathan C. Smith, Assistant Professor of American Studies, Saint Louis University; and Julian Yates, Associate Professor of English and Material Culture Studies, University of Delaware.

For more information and registration materials, please visit our website at http://www.udel.edu/materialculture/emerging_scholars.html

or email us at emerging.scholars@gmail.com

CFP: On Display: Historic Homes and Great Estates

2008-03-09T09:40:00.000-04:00

The Stan Hywet Symposium Committee is proud to announce a “Call for Presentations” for the first annual The Stan Hywet Symposium. The symposium was initiated in 2007 as a forum for the study and discussion of a diverse range of historical, architectural, and preservation issues. It is a collaborative effort through The University of Akron, Kent State University and Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens to address such issues for both scholarly and public audiences. Symposium presentations take place at the historic Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens in Akron, Ohio and include personalized tours and intimate gatherings. The symposium expects to bring together over 200 participants from all areas of the region for two days of programming and networking. The 2008 Symposium is entitled: On Display: Historic Homes and Great Estates and is set for October 17-18, 2008. Deadline for submissions: 5:00pm, April 2, 2008. For more information please visit www.stanhywet.org or contact Mark J. Heppner, Symposium Liaison, at mheppner@stanhywet.org.

Theories and Things: Re-evaluating Material Culture

2007-10-08T08:39:00.000-04:00

Hallelujah! There are humanities left in the university galaxy--here at Kent State there's talk of getting rid of the Department of Philosophy ENTIRELY. I heart The Humanities Project at the University of Rochester. To wit:

Overview

This Humanities Project is a collaboration between the Department of Art and Art History and the Memorial Art Gallery in conjunction with the traveling exhibit "Wild By Design: Two Hundred Years of Innovation and Artistry in American Quilts" on view at the Memorial Art Gallery from January 20 to March 16, 2008.

In this exhibit, and in programming leading up to it during fall semester on the River Campus, we seek to re-evaluate the field of material culture studies – a venerable one within American Studies. For many years an interdisciplinary pursuit (practiced by art historians, folklorists, textile scholars, and others), in recent years this field has been re-invigorated by fresh theoretical insights provided by anthropologists, historians, cultural theorists, and feminist scholars. Studies of ordinary things such as quilts, kaleidoscopes, furniture, clothing, coca-cola ads, and cookie jars have achieved a new prominence. Indeed, the journal Critical Inquiry devoted an entire issue to 'Things' in 2002.

The mounting of the exhibit Wild by Design is an opportunity to think about this new transdisciplinary approach to what Bill Brown (arguably the foremost practitioner of 'thing theory') calls 'object relations in an expanded field.' How does the making and collecting of vernacular objects play out in terms of gender, ethnic, and nationalist identities? 'The social life of things' (as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls it) manifests itself differently in each historical era; moreover, our cherished things have protean histories as they are used, collected, and venerated as objects of a national past. Even very modest things (a pieced bed covering, a 19th century advertisement) may be invested with civic mythologies, and can reveal inter-cultural economies.

Our programs will encourage students, faculty, and the interested public to think about theories and about things themselves as they exist in the museum, the archive, the academy, the marketplace, and in our own kitchens and living rooms, on our own beds and on our own bodies.

For a descriptive list of speakers and activities: http://www.rochester.edu/College/humanities/projects/index?thing&speakers

Alas, though the project's description argues for the central roles of American studies, anthropology, and history, the collective background of the speakers do not reflect these fields and disciplines as part of their training. At times what we have is a sort of colonization of one disciplinary perspective/theory rather than the 'treaty making" inherent in interdisciplinarity and its promise of new knowledge production. Somehow more transdisciplinary? This project features the "new" fields of visual culture and "thing theory." Both fields hail from disciplines with traditional emphasis on formal analysis (art history and literature) and earn their way into scholarship as "new" by adopting a critical stance on consumer capitalism, colonialism, gender, race, etc. Indeed, the emphasis now is on exchange theory, economies (gift and market), and the like. We risk, though, converting aesthetic and distinctive material artifacts into ahistorical, fungible forms, akin to currency. Those ordinary things listed in this description have been elevated through the market and through scholarship to art. I'm asking the same sort of question that Svetlana Alpers asked in her "Is Art History?" in 1977!

Sixth Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars

2007-10-03T09:36:00.001-04:00

Material. Culture. Now.
Winterthur Museum & Country Estate
Saturday, April 12, 2008

The Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware
invites submissions for papers to be given at the Sixth Annual
Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars.

Focus: The symposium provides graduate students and other emerging
scholars with a venue for interdisciplinary dialogue relating to the
study of material life and culture. Participants are free of
chronological and topical restraints but are strongly encouraged to
engage with contemporary issues pertaining to the study of objects and
to give particular attention to their own use of objects, whether as
evidence, within a theoretical discourse, or within a comparative
context. Past symposia have included presenters from the fields of
American Studies, Anthropology, Archaeology, Consumer Studies,
English, History, and the Histories of Art, Architecture, Design and
Technology.

Format: The symposium will consist of nine presentations divided into
three panels. Each presentation is limited to twenty minutes and each
panel is followed by comments from established scholars in the field.
There will be two morning sessions and one afternoon session, with
breaks for discussion following each session and over lunch.
Participants will also have the opportunity to tour Winterthur's
unparalleled collection of early American decorative arts.

Submissions: The proposal should be no more than 300 words, and
should clearly indicate both the topic and the critical approach
taken. Preference will be given to papers that address contemporary
issues in material culture studies and that are analytic rather than
descriptive in nature. Send your proposal, along with a current c.v.
(no more than two pages), to emerging.scholars@gmail.com

Deadline: Proposals must be received by Monday, November 12th, 2007.
Speakers will be notified of the vetting committee's decision by early
January 2008. Confirmed speakers will be asked to provide symposium
organizers with digital images for use in publicity and are required
to submit a final draft of their papers by February 25, 2008. Travel
grants will be available for all speakers.

Website: http://www.udel.edu/materialculture/emerging_scholars.html

--
Nicholas R. Bell, Winterthur Program in American Material Culture,
University of Delaware.
nicholas.r.bell@gmail.com

Colleen M. Terry, Department of Art History, University of Delaware.
cterry@udel.edu

DIY Material Culture

2007-09-06T10:21:00.000-04:00

For those of us interested in how Americans, past and present, have shaped their environments by remaking, making over, making do, The New York Times presents "Romancing the Flat Pack: Ikea, Repurposed."

Author Penelope Green surveys the worldwide (but mostly North American and European) movement in taking both retrieved (rescued) items (mostly from city streets on trash day and from trash bins) and new items (such as those found at the human consumer lab-rat-like maze known as Ikea) and refashioning said items into somethings else (somethings elses?). There's a blog, so this activity is now officially ordained: ikeahacker.blogspot.com. There has been the magazine ReadyMade, which has now gone big time with its acquisition by Meredith Corporation. Green also mentions my current fascination: etsy.com, a crafter's nirvana, the Internet "place to buy and sell all things handmade."

This is big business, really, part of a culture based on ever higher levels of consumption and "down" (if not true leisure) time. It's one thing to HAVE to scrounge, scrimp, and save; quite another to be selective about pulling out an item, making it over, and calling it high concept design through dumpster diving or purchasing on the cheap "raw materials" from Ikea. As etsy.com founder Robert Kalin put it,

“We don’t look to a forest for wood, ... We don’t want to use ‘new’ wood. We look at a Dumpster or an Ikea store as a place to go harvest ‘raw’ materials. It’s a very urban phenomenon: we have the resources we need and we have become expert at repurposing them, like taking these broken Ikea chairs and making them into a table.”

I'm certainly not dissing those who who create from crates and barrels (but not from Crate and Barrel) or throw pots in a barn (but not the Pottery Barn). (I know, one bad pun was enough but, lucky for you, it's two-for-one Thursday.) I have fallen in love with knitting, and have reorganized my days to include at least an hour of the activity as a sort of ritual reenacting my late mother's skillful investment in afghans, sweaters, and yes, toilet paper "hats." Yarn stores have become meccas for me; I find there women (and occasionally men) who are interesting, funny, caring, and invested in creating. No one I have met is making anything for sale; rather, the projects they chose are based on relationships and events. They may page through the latest magazine and see a cap and think to make it because it's "perfect" for a friend and family member. The act of creation, the sense of completing a project: very rewarding. Making twenty handmade items to sell on etsy.com: I'm not sure it's the same.

We have, ladies and gentlemen, seen this before: the Aesthetic Movement at the end of the nineteenth century launched a generation of artful do-it-yourselfers--and I use "artful" here with purpose. That movement (and the Arts and Crafts Movement) was about "artifying" everyday life: though we know much about Art Pottery such as that produced by women-run potteries such as Cincinnati's Rookwood and at Newcomb in New Orleans, for example, decorative art historians have paid less attention to local clubs and classes across the U.S. that taught various skills in decorative arts and produced, well, not-so-great results. I've tried to make pottery; next question please.

Like the individuals interviewed in the Times piece, participants in the Aesthetic Movement did not eschew machine-made goods as some proponents of the Arts and Crafts Movement did; furniture and other manufacturers quickly designed and labeled their wares "Art Furniture," "Art Pottery," even photographers, making use of dry glass-plate negatives and retouching techniques, offered "Art Photography" to their clientele.

The Aesthetic Movement concentrated on the domestic interior. So, too, the current DIY movement perhaps better-named "Design It Yourself" rather than "Do It Yourself." (This is what makes what Target Stores is doing with everyday design so fascinating. See the slide show that accompanies the Times piece or at etsy. com and see whether you can't see many of those pieces, simple enough to be mass produced, sold at Target. More work, please, on the relationship of professional and amateur, market and homemade, etc., etc.)

After Modernism, design is the thing, and the current movement of selectively and freely taking the detritus of modern consumption and (hand) making it one's own is but a recycled version of an early campaign in the first Gilded Age.

Winterthur Research Fellowships, 2008-09

2007-09-02T20:35:00.000-04:00

Winterthur Museum & Country Estate announces its 2008-2009 Research Fellowship Program consisting of NEH, McNeil Dissertation, and short-term residential fellowships to support advanced study of American art, culture, and history. Fellows have full access to library collections of more than87,000 volumes and one-half million manuscripts andimages, searchable online at:

http://www.winterthur.org/research/library_resources.asp.

Fellows may conduct research based on the museum collection of objects and artworks made or used in America to 1860. Applications are due January 15, 2008. For more details or to apply, visit http://www.winterthur.org/research/fellowship.asp.

CFP: Incarceration Nation: Voices from the Early American Gaol

2007-09-02T20:30:00.000-04:00

The material culture of the enforced poverty of prison and penitentiary inmates is a topic begging to be examined!

Call for Papers
Incarceration Nation: Voices from the Early American Gaol

The McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Library Companyof Philadelphia, in cooperation with the Department of History of the University of Maryland, College Park, and the Department of English of the College of New Jersey, will convene a conference in Philadelphia, April 3-4, 2009, on the experience of the incarcerated in jails and prisons in early America. While scholars have paid lavish attention to the political and ideological underpinnings of the development of prison infrastructures and supervision programs, the experience of those incarcerated in jails and prisons has so far escaped sustained examination. On the occasion of the 180th anniversary of the opening of Eastern State Penitentiary, this conference will explore issues of incarceration in early America from the perspective of inmates, visitors, and workers on the inside of early jails and prisons. Subjects of particular interest include:

- ritual and spectacle
- fictive incarceration experiences
- images of incarceration
- material culture
- psychological dimensions of captivity
- hygiene and sanitation
- mimetic corruption
- infrapolitics of confinement
- sexuality and violence
- the experiential dialectic between the body and the state.

Please send 250 word abstracts and a brief c.v. to the McNeil Center (mceas@ccat.sas.upenn.edu) no later than Friday, January 18 ,2008. Priority will be given to proposals advancing innovative thinking based on unpublished research. Any questions should be directed tothe conference organizers Michele Lise Tarter (tarter@tcnj.edu) and Richard Bell (rjbell@umd.edu).

CFP: Silver in the Americas: The International Context

2007-08-07T11:26:00.000-04:00

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston invites submissions for papers to be given at a conference devoted to new scholarly research on the production, use, and consumption of silver in North, Central and South America. This conference will coincide with the publication of Silver in the Americas, 1600-2000, a fresh look at the silver collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, including key works from colonial Massachusetts and the Spanish American colonies in Central and South America to modern works from the turn of the twenty-first century.

The goal of this conference is to look at silver in a broader social and historical context, expanding beyond the traditional, often limited, boundaries of place and time into which silver scholarship is frequently situated. Papers can be critical, historical, or theoretical approaches to the theme, covering topics from the pre-colonial period to the present. The participation of individuals from varied disciplines is encouraged. These include, but are not limited to, American studies, archaeology, art history, economics, gender studies, geography, history, literature, material culture, and sociology. Submissions from emerging scholars are especially encouraged.

The conference will take place at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on May 2, 2008. Speakers will receive travel expenses and an honorarium. To participate, please submit a proposal of no more than 300 words, along with a curriculum vitae, by October 15, 2007. Final papers should not exceed 40 minutes. Speakers will be notified by December 2007.

Proposals should be sent to:

Jessica Roscio, Symposium Coordinator
Art of the Americas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115

e-mail jroscio@mfa.org.

Remarks on Richard Pells' "History Descending a Staircase: American Historians and American Culture"

2007-08-04T14:34:00.000-04:00

Historian Richard Pells offers up an essay on culture in and as American history in the 3 August 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education. He asks why American historians do not teach culture in their courses--though he does not offer evidence for his assertion that they do not. He includes discussion of American Studies (strangely stating that the postwar American Studies movement "was" interdisciplinary, somehow implying that it is no longer is). So I thought it appropriate to offer a comment here. I find the essay confusing, and I'm afraid my response is equally if not more muddled. As much as I appreciate Dr. Pells’ point that culture matters, especially in the light of arguments of what the current administration considers “traditional American history,” here goes:

Dr. Pells uses Duchamp’s iconic Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) as a metaphor for historians’ “descent” from cultural history to social history in the last half of the twentieth century. With new technologies students who are "culturally illiterate," he hopes, may be able to “ascend the cultural staircase” that leads to knowledge of (for Pells) twentieth-century culture makers and cultural icons.

Dr. Pells depicts the New Social History of the 1970s as a movement so influenced by the era’s political upheaval as to be “forced” to ask two questions: “Whose culture? Whose history?” He revives the culture wars in literature and the arts of the 1980s by linking American historians’ lack of attention to the nation’s “pre-eminent writers, artists, actors, or musicians” to students’ “cultural ignorance.” He diminishes the New Social History (which he places at the bottom of his metaphorical staircase) taught in college classrooms by reducing its subjects—“mostly the exploited and the victimized”—and observing that historians are teaching not history, but feeling because “we sympathize with” these groups.

Arguing that History departments hire "clones," Dr. Pells states that "The urge to assemble a collection of like-minded souls has meant that, over the past 30 years, most history departments have concentrated on hiring social historians, especially in American history. But 'social history' is narrowly conceived."

Sympathy and souls: real history, it seems, is the stuff of disinterested minds. To make a case against the New Social History by feminizing its subjects and practitioners in an essay dedicated to historically feminized groups such as writers, artists, actors, musicians, etc., is puzzling.

Dr. Pells relates his dutiful obeisance to his professors by reading what they told him to read. It isn’t at all clear to me that Dr. Pells liked learning what Abstract Expressionism was; he had to because he wouldn’t have “had even the faintest prayer of becoming an American historian.” This seems like boot camp training. Is he stating that we of the Like Souls Brigade haven’t been strict enough with our students? Is the sympathizing that passes for instruction the culprit? Moreover, what are the implications of a humanities scholar currently arguing that one learn a specific subject to get a job rather than learn because it's a positive good for one's self and one's society?

It's difficult not to employ the metaphor of the cultural staircase to the groups social historians study (“women, workers, immigrants, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans in a country inhospitable to the poor and the powerless”) at the bottom of the stairs to a white class of persons of privilege and name at its top. Is the staircase the “social ladder” in our New Gilded Age?

I say this because of the forty or so names Dr. Pells offers as examples of American writers, artists, dramatists, and musicians, only one is female and another is African American. Marcel Duchamp appears, but not Gertrude Stein, as Modernism’s maven. Charlie Chaplin is included, Mary Pickford is not, though both founded United Artists. The list continues: Jackson Pollack [sic] but not Lee Krasner is the preferred Abstract Expressionist, Arthur Miller but not Lorraine Hansberry is the century's playwright, Fred Astaire but not Ginger Rogers is the dancer-choreographer-actor extraordinaire. The only women mentioned by name in this essay are Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Marilyn Monroe. It’s difficult to imagine how these three women are linked except through their sexuality, though Marlon Brando, equally exuding sex appeal and the subject of campy imitation since the 1950s, is described as “mesmerizing” in his films—somehow more an artist than Monroe. (Both were depicted by Andy Warhol who doesn’t warrant mention but whose legacy is surely observed in the “celebutante” Hilton.)

Dr. Pells doesn’t question why the individuals he names are, well, individuals he names. (It reminds me of a late nineteenth-century Harper's editorial in which the author asserts that the distinction between the middle classes and those below in the masses was the fact that members of the middle classes could be named.) It’s as if he defines artistic expression as free from the biases of gender, race, ethnicity, region, class, age, disability. With his dismissal of the insights of the New Social History, he does not recognize that that movement allowed us to understand the political, social, and economic structures in which certain individuals could become “pre-eminent.”

What Dr. Pells calls “traditional cultural history” I would call “culture history,” for he seems to ignore the fact that scholars themselves helped in defining who got to be a famous artist (aside from graduates of the Famous Artists School) and who gets to be famous for a while only to be dropped from the list by being ignored by culture's mavens and scholars. Consider who is included and excluded from Columbia’s Literary History of the United States [1929], for example, and now. Literary historians since the 1980s have restored many authors to the reknown and impact they once possessed; many of those authors weren't white and male and Protestant. Dr. Pells does not discuss the New Cultural History, with its charge of exploring the dynamics of historic social action and cultural expression and the ways in which scholars interpret and represent those dynamics. Studying American culture in the past and understanding history itself as a powerful cultural practice constitute cultural history.

Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow, for Dr. Pells, implies that “high culture was inherently esoteric, class-bound, and somehow 'undemocratic'—in short, antithetical to the values social historians championed.” (I disagree with his interpretation of Levine’s work.) But such a reading that distinguishes high culture from low or popular culture so completely as to isolate one from the other. If Dr. Levine is right, in stating that "high culture became less a shared possession of the entire society than a refuge for snobs," Dr. Pells asks, “How … could ordinary people relate to Duchamp’s painting if they couldn’t detect either a nude or a staircase?”

I find it interesting that as he debates Dr. Levine Dr. Pells himself differentiates the "high culture" of the Armory Show and Duchamp and commercialized popular culture. Part of the reaction to the Armory Show was premised on the fact that it was "sold" to some kind of American "public" well educated in the power of advertising and consumer culture. Theodore Roosevelt disliked the publicity machine surrounding the event. (More about TR later.)

Could ordinary people detect the nude and the staircase? Was the painting a "shared possession of the entire society"? It's hard to fathom that all Americans shared the painting in the same way--the better part of Levine's point. After all, he followed audiences through the spaces for their cultural expressions, and not strictly the cultural forms themselves.

My paternal great-grandmother did not see Duchamp’s painting at the Armory in 1913; she and her children arrived at Ellis Island later that year. I doubt they could have afforded to attend any art show. I have no idea about what constituted their cultural literacy, or what they gained as they made their way through the cities and towns of eastern Europe, to Germany, boarded a ship modern in design, and landed in New York. Yet they were curious by nature and I don’t doubt for a minute that my babci Filipina Piejko, like many others, may have at least wondered at the comic cartoon depiction of the painting in New York's Evening Sun, “The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour in the Subway).” Many more Americans would have giggled at the cartoon of the crazy-quilt-making grandmother depicted as the “The Original Cubist” that appeared at the same time. (For these images go here and scroll down.)

How many Americans agreed with outgoing President Theodore Roosevelt, who dismissed the Armory Show as a publicity stunt and preferred his bathroom’s Navajo rug to Duchamp’s now iconic work because the former was “sincere” (read: authentic)? Though TR described himself as a “layman” in his Outlook essay (March 1913), it certainly was a political pose. (He visited the Show on the day Woodrow Wilson was sworn in.) No one, then and now, could accuse TR of being ordinary. One may, however, see his critique as based on privilege and nativist sentiment. He rejected European artists but embraced the American artists in the show.

(TR really did get it, however. Ironically, he was more pleased with the design of his Navajo rug at a time when Modernists embraced the “primitive” arts of “native” peoples in North America, Africa, and Asia and governments treated them shamefully.)

The popular reactions to Duchamp’s work were structured by the democratizing and pedagogical medium of print if not the artwork itself. “Average” Americans could learn about Modernism through humorous depictions and in so doing could explore new ways of seeing as well as new definitions of art. This was a process of evaluation, of what would be culturally legitimate, and Americans engaged that question with humor, mockery, disdain, shock, despair, and delight. (There's that sympathizing again.) Finding the nude and the staircase in Duchamp’s painting was presented as a puzzle; several art historians have dismissed those strategies as opinions based in ignorance or rejection of what avant-garde artists and their supporters presented.

At one and the same time, the popular spoofs of the Armory Show’s works most certainly depended on the public’s willingness to engage in such debates. One wonders, too, if in the spoofs there was evidence of different forms of understanding and acceptance and rejection, and those forms can help us understand how Americans did or did not "share possession" of Modernism. (I hasten to point out that "sharing possession" isn't the same as sharing meaning[s]). I hope I’m not being disrespectful by stating that I think Lawrence Levine would have seen that, had he continued his study of cultural hierarchies into the twentieth century.

Pells’ concern about the transmission of an American cultural canon from one generation to the next cannot be rejected. Rather, it should be recast to consider the question of what counts as culturally significant as a process rather than as items on a canonical checklist constituting American cap-C Culture. It’s telling, I think, that Dr. Pells chooses the iconic moment of the avant-garde’s challenge to American society to frame his argument, but pays little attention to the contemporary scene in which Postmodernism (like Modernism before it) has challenged the nation, exploring in many and new media the uses of the past and the technologies of the present. We need to understand cultures past but also cultures emerging. We need to understand that the “traditional” is an invention for each generation—what will, for example, be the tradition from which contemporary “outsider art” emerges? How did the revolution in graphic design and easier access to duplicating create zines, which are now displayed in museums? He calls today’s students “culturally illiterate” but does not explore what they do indeed know. Though students may not “read (or buy) books,” they “do have more access than any previous generation to culture.” They must know something. They can learn.

That said, I believe that the New Social History isn't at fault (and I don't think Dr. Pells intends to fault those in the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, even as his examples of artists, writers, and actors are in the main male and white). I think the problem is, as Dr. Pells writes, hiring practices and, by implication, training. Those of us trained in American Studies and in the use of non-textual evidence are constantly at pains to explain to historians that other forms of evidence--art and material culture, photographs and dramatic staging, dance performances and musical notes--are not merely illustrations or examples of whatever narrative of American history one espouses. Too many historians say they "do" material culture or visual culture but what they often do is impose what a text says onto an image. Walter Benjamin wrote about this a long time ago in his work on the relationship of text and image. Training historians should not concentrate so fully on the written word and fit methodologies from certain types of writing to literary works, to artworks, to the material and experiential requirements of other forms of cultural expression.

Robert B. Townsend comments at the AHA's blog, that cultural history is alive and well in history departments. I would venture to say that many of those cultural historians are interested in representation but not art; literature as social documents rather than as artistic expression; and the like. I am never as widely read as I wish to be, but lately I haven't read another historian's work that included any sort of analysis or theory from art..

This is all to say that the late-twentieth-century emphasis on interdisciplinarity had another effect when it came to hiring in History departments: disciplinary boundaries were policed rather than lowered. When I applied for a job at Big Midwestern University in the 1990s I told the dean how I could bring to its History department material culture studies as well as courses in cultural and intellectual history. She looked at me and said "All we need is someone to teach Emerson." And she meant as an intellectual historian and not as a literary critic. The department offered the job to a person trained in a History department (the others on the interview list, including me, had American Studies degrees). Americanists in my current department have made clear their disdain for interdisciplinarity and material culture studies. If Dr. Pells sees social historians everywhere, it's not the fault of the social historians but rather of the dynamics defining disciplines against emerging fields, theories, and methods--and deans.

“Whose culture? Whose history?” Those questions have been central to my learning as an undergraduate student in the late 1970s, as a graduate student in interdisciplinary American Studies in the 1980s, and as a member of a History department today teaching American material culture, women's history, and cultural history. The New Social History I learned was not "fashionable" but instrumental. It didn’t blind me to George Gershwin or Ted Shawn or F. Scott Fitzgerald. It allowed me to explore with the guidance of my professors what it meant to be Black in America; I became ever more sensitized to the experiences of others beyond my own. Without the New Social History I would not have known nor appreciated Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party or loved Tillie Olsen’s short stories. The historian who taught me American intellectual history considered Margaret Fuller a member of the Ladies' Auxiliary of the Transcendentalists. Through my courses in women's studies I came to disagree with him.

Culture does matter in American history. Here Dr. Pells and I agree. How we study culture and its relation to the American experiment (his seems, Duchamp besides, an updated exceptionalism), though, differs.

CFP: "Commonplace Yet Extraordinary: Design Histories of Everyday Objects"

2007-06-21T11:14:00.000-04:00

Friday, May 16, 2008

Sponsored by the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware

Biographies of everyday objects are a burgeoning area of study in design history, and are well supported by Hagley's growing collection of designers' papers including those of Raymond Loewy, Marc Harrison, Thomas Lamb and Richard Hollerith.

We invite scholars pursuing innovative research in this area to submit paper proposals for a symposium on Friday, May 16, 2008. The symposium's theme is the the histories of design processes that created everyday objects, such as appliances, tools, equipment, and miscellaneous things commonly used in homes, offices, factories, and public spaces. We discourage proposals on motor vehicles, clothing, furniture, and buildings.

Papers should be historically grounded and analyze the itneractions between designers, producers, and users. Perspectives from history, art history, design history, sociology, material culture studies as well as other disciplines are welcome.

Paper proposals are due by December 1, 2007 and should consist of a short cv and an abstract of no more than 500 words. Presenters’ travel expenses will be covered by Hagley. Send proposals to Carol Lockman, clockman@Hagley.org, fax 302-655-3188, or Hagley Museum and Library, PO Box 3630, Wilmington DE 19807.

Mary Douglas, 1921-2007

2007-05-18T14:45:00.000-04:00

Anthropologist Mary Douglas has died, Richard Fardon of the Guardian reports. Without her works, Purity and Danger (1966) and (with Baron Isherwood) The World of Goods (1979), my research (and I dare so, that of many others in material culture studies) would have been all the poorer. Requiescat in pace.

Fields of Vision: The Material and Visual Culture of New England, 1600-1830

2007-05-18T11:03:00.001-04:00

This looks to be a TERRIFIC conference! Mark your calendars: November 9-10, 2007, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA. Here's the description:

It has been twenty-five years since the path-breaking exhibition New England Begins opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The exhibit, and its comprehensive three-volume catalogue, brought new scholarly attention to the art, artifacts and built environment of early New England. Since that time, the discipline of material culture has matured, while the emerging field of visual culture has brought new methods and genres to bear on the study of images, objects, landscapes and the technologies that shaped them. This two-day conference, sponsored by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society, will assess new approaches to the material and visual culture of New England. Reflecting the scholarly trends that have emerged in the past quarter century, the conference will extend the chronological scope of inquiry to embrace the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and will explicitly address the innovative work being done in the field of visual culture.

The line-up is available at http://www.americanantiquarian.org/fieldsofvision.htm

Rebuilding the House that is the Smithsonian

2007-03-27T10:12:00.000-04:00

Lawrence M. Small resigned on Sunday. What he leaves behind is an institution that is much in need of repair--from the leaky roofs to the public trust. Excellent people have left the museums under Small's "reign," and the excellent people who have chosen to remain have endured budget cuts, staff cuts, and a real hit to their collective reputation. Small's decisions have resulted in less research and education being undertaken, undermining Smithson's original mission for the institution.

I do hope that the acting Secretary and the Regents think seriously about what is best for the collections, the research, and the staff that so devotedly and intellectually attend to their work for the public. The Regents, however, have betrayed the Institution and the American people in their willingness to let Mr. Small adapt a business model to a non-business entity. Time after time, this gambit has been attempted at the nation's universities, and has failed. It's time to recognize that the era of the MBA (and the MBA President) is over.

Larry Small's Material Culture: Priceless

2007-03-20T18:52:00.000-04:00

In recent days the Washington Post has explored Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lawrence Small's expenditures. Let's review those expenses allowable for Small's Woodley Park home because he entertains there:

Cleaning a chandelier in his Woodley Park home: $2,535
Well, that's okay. Certainly one wishes to entertain potential donors in the right light.

Replacing French doors: $15,000
What was wrong with the old ones? Not ceremonial enough? Did this occur during the anti-French "Freedom Fries" era?

Replacing lap pool's natural gas heater and pump: $4,000
Okay, just what kind of entertaining is going on for the American people's museum business?

Being the Smithsonian Secretary who has destroyed the public trust and academic freedom by selling parts of the Smithsonian to private individuals and corporations: PRICELE$$

Some folks are asking how Mr. Small got the job. He explained this in his Spring 2002 American University commencement address:

In 1991, I was recruited by Fannie Mae, the big housing finance company here in Washington, D.C., to become its president-by accident. But I'm going to deliberately leave that tale out to finish with my final story.

In the fall of 1998, the tenth Secretary in the Smithsonian Institution's then 153-year history announced he was going to retire in a year's time. This was no surprise to anyone since it was in accordance with a plan he and the Smithsonian's Board of Regents had agreed to four years earlier when he had taken the job.

A search committee was formed, chaired by two members of the board. One of the two was the husband of a member of the board of directors of Fannie Mae.

Every year, my wife and I send out holiday cards. Usually, we'll have a photograph taken of one of the pieces in our ethnographic art collection and use it as the cover of the card. In the fall of 1998, we had done just that and sent it out to 1,000 of our best friends.

So in January of 1999, right after the announcement of the formation of the Smithsonian's new Secretarial Search Committee, the co-chair of the committee was sitting in his living room thinking, "Where are we gong to find a new Secretary?" He looked up at the mantel over his fireplace where his wife had displayed some of the holiday cards they had received and he saw a picture of just the type of ethnographic art piece you'd expect to see in the Smithsonian-and it came from guess who?

As they say, "the rest is history," and I can tell you, I couldn't be more passionate about what I'm doing.

Well, there you go. So much for meritocracy and public service. The last time I filled out a job application for a Smithsonian job, it went on for 47 pages. Heck! I could have just sent Christmas cards!

As it stands, the Smithsonian is experiencing the loss of revenues, budget cuts, and deteriorating buildings. Too many people I know and respect have left the Smithsonian, sad in and of itself, but the Powers That Be haven't replaced anyone. The collections are suffering. Small's office furnishings, however, are resplendent.

Fabricating Quilts and Myths

2007-02-02T12:04:00.000-05:00

Excellent op-ed piece in the New York Times by Fergus M. Bordewich, on the issue of "secret code" quilts' use in the Underground Railroad: "History's Tangled Threads".

Born, raised, and again living in the Connecticut Western Reserve of Ohio, where abolitionism was strong, I heard many stories of houses being stops on the Railroad. In the warp of history and the weft of myth some illogical fabrication may occur. The temperance hotel built in the 1840s at my hometown's center was still standing when I was a child; for some reason the building's basement was considered a stop on the Railroad. Fair assumption: temperance reformers and abolitionists could be one and the same; this part of Ohio (unlike the rest of the state) was antislavery and pro-women's rights (the blue and red voting record, even today, is pretty consistent). Yet, the evidence one town elder offered to prove that the hotel sheltered runaway slaves was that there were iron rings in the cellar. Slaves were chained, right, when even running away?

I have also, on one occasion, had to tell a new old house owner that his house could not have been a stop on the Railroad because, as he himself knew, it was built in 1878. A young couple who purchased my aunt's octagon farmhouse were interviewed about a decade ago in the local newspaper. They, too, broached the topic of the Railroad and the house's role; they also stated that the insulation in the house was terrific and that "they built houses better in the nineteenth century." My father and I sent the newspaper clipping to my aunt, who now lives in Arizona. She wrote us that the insulation was replaced in the 1950s--and that it was pretty darn sturdy.

The very tangibility, fixedness, reality of material culture has a way of convincing people of events and ideas in the past. The ways we interpret artifacts tell us a lot about what people wish to believe and not what was. The Underground Railroad remains a popularly (mis) understood phenomenon that offers modern-day white Americans the means to distance themselves from both historical and contemporary racism. The quilt code myth empowers both African Americans and white Americans in its supposed effective subversiveness, its use by individuals to triumph over abusive structures of power.

Yet the purpose of historical inquiry is not to make us feel good. So much of material culture study is about the stuff that comforts (houses, furniture, cars, even guns of the winning side and the weapons of the losing side); little wonder that the erroneous mythic association of historic quilts with utility, or poverty, or a folk, is now furthered with an empowering secret code. Legends and myths are created with specific physical landscapes and material culture in mind; historical inquiry doesn't reject these legends and myths but seeks to place these ideas and stories in a time and place to answer why such tales are meaningful. I haven't read much on why the "quilt code myth" has so quickly attained its power to convince.

Tasteful Fencing Tips to the President, as Hypothetically Suggested by Martha Stewart

2006-10-26T18:50:00.000-04:00

Dear Mr. President:

Today you signed into law an order to construct a fence along 700 miles of the Mexican-United States border. That’s a lot of fencing! If you’re a do-it-yourselfer like me, you want to plan early and make sure you’ve the right tools and the right materials. Depend on the good folks at your local hardware store for sage advice and quality materials, and not the Department of Homeland Security or FEMA or Halliburton or even the Army Corps of Engineers.

Some barrier fences have become monuments, such as the Romans’ Hadrian’s Wall to keep out the Scots. The emperor Hadrian was experiencing some military problems with the peoples of the lands he and his predecessors had conquered; his “Roman Wall” in England was constructed of remarkably durable limestone in some parts and beautiful sandstone in others, while other sections were “green”—that is, created from turf. Turrets and forts offered pleasing viewing platforms and quiet respites. Hadrian’s Wall is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which goes to show you the lasting beauty and value to be had when you think ahead.

“Good fences,” the poet Robert Frost wrote, “make good neighbors.” To please your neighbor as well as yourself, take the time to consider the style of your fence. There’s no reason a security fence cannot only be functional but aesthetically pleasing. Perhaps you would like to create the ambience that Frost created in his poem: New England-y and all, with a stone barrier. Yours is an old Connecticut family, Mr. President, right? Perhaps a picket fence, designed to ensure privacy around houses, the symbol of the American Dream?

Too colonial for you? Why not utilize other beautiful fencing forms employed by emigrating Americans as they crossed the Ohio Country and the prairies? Made of split logs laid atop each other at an angle, a split-rail fence picturesquely zig-zags through the landscape, and may remind visitors of one of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. The Republicans in 1860 called Lincoln the “Rail Splitter” to emphasize the candidate’s commitment to free labor—that any ~~guest worker~~ farmhand with spit and muscle and will and an ax could not only make fences, but make his way up (let alone build) the socioeconomic ladder.

Split-rail fences were also called “snake” or “worm” fences. If you are on bad terms with your neighbors, you may think about another form of fencing lest you give, or invite, offense.

Then again, you may not wish to spoil the view. Your own 1600-acre ranch, near Crawford, Texas, must offer spectacular, unbroken views of meadows and sky, field and stream. I know you use barbed wire fencing there to keep people out though that fencing cannot be seen from your house. Created first in Illinois in 1874, barbed wire is so intricate and varied in its manufacture I must dedicate an essay to its history and collection. And its metal jaggedness reinforces the signs you employ: "No stopping. No standing. No parking on right of way."

So may I suggest ha-has? A ha-ha is an eighteenth-century English form of sunken fence, used in ornamental gardens so that the barrier (ditch) is invisible and the view remains unspoiled. You wouldn’t offend your visitors and neighbors with those inhospitable and unsightly signs and, knowing your love of practical jokes, you and Mr. Rove may enjoy sitting, like the Minutemen, in lawn chairs waiting for unsuspecting persons to share in the surprise.

It is so important, though, to discuss with your neighbors your plans to construct fences. Make sure you also know the zoning code in your area. It’s sometimes more difficult and more costly to mend fences than it is to build them.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

--Robert Frost, “Mending Fences”

Indiana Jones Denied Tenure

2006-10-17T12:03:00.000-04:00

Break up your week and yourself by reading this tenure denial report on the fictional Indiana Jones, available at McSweeney's:

Back From Yet Another Globetrotting Adventure, Indiana Jones Checks His Mail and Discovers That His Bid For Tenure Has Been Denied.

Material culture proved the culprit! Kudos to the author, Andy F. Bryan.

Khaki as Klass Kamouflage

2006-10-06T14:31:00.000-04:00

The New York Times reported recently that Wal-Mart is considering altering its workers' uniforms to polo shirts and khaki pants. New York fashion designer Stan Herman is quoted as saying that the new, "preppy" costume is "very classy": “'Wal-Mart will raise the status of 1.3 million Americans' who work for the chain," he asserted.

Well. There you are. Clothes make all the difference, living wages, affordable health care, and decent housing be damned.

Now, mind you, I can count on one hand the number of times I've been in a Wal-Mart. Besides the fact that I don't shop there because I don't condone the uber-corporation's policies, I simply do not like shopping there. Unclean, too big, confusing: little wonder the clerks wore vests and smocks. Give them those lighted wands to guide traffic and the uniform makes sense--the clerks more often than not are directing traffic in dark stores that have no inherent order. After all, the one thing every Wal-Mart shopper has to watch out for are the fork lifts.

Wal-Mart is also considering asking employees to buy their new uniforms! The article's author observes that the smock and the vest have long been "emblems of the working class." I'm not sure he's correct, though the use of protective clothing in handwork rather than headwork is surely correct. And that was true of middle-class housewives and landowning farmers and artists. Rather, the smocks and vests, adorned with "How May I Help You?" or a smiley-face, etc., are the uniforms of political campaigners--they have more in common with one sees at a national party convention of yesteryear.

But what we seem to have here is a sort of insidious Wal-Martian (!) camouflaging of their widely criticized treatment of employees--underpaid, underinsured, undervalued. That the author did not even think to discuss the shift in uniforms to "business casual" is perhaps due to the fact that the article appears in the Business section--a section nearly always given over to issues concerning the "suits" in corner offices in shining commercial towers rather than the issues concerning labor. There's almost a romanticization in the "loss" of the working-class "uniform" here.

Is this a new front in the nation's class war? Khaki, meaning "dust colored" in Urdu, was "discovered" by the British Army when it occupied Afghanistan and India in the 1840s. By 1885 the British Army in India had adopted the color for its uniform, and many of the world's armed forces (including the United States) followed, well, suit in their designs for tropical or warm weather uniforms. With the adoption of a color associated with the military, perhaps Wal-Mart has declared victory and proclaimed all Americans--be they employees or consumers--classless. Huzzah!

I guess we can all blame the Gap more than we can blame preppies for Wal-Mart's fixation on khaki, though. How a color associated with the military became "business casual" is an interesting question. But remember the Gap's ad campaign launched in 1993: So-and-so famous person wore khakis? James Dean, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, and Andy Warhol were but a few of the featured celebrities--all from the mid twentieth century, all in the popular nostalgia of the 50s and early 60s, and all somehow icons that transcended the popular and were, in and of themselves, rules breakers and trend setters, even though they all wore khakis, and likely did so because of the influences of World War II, the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam Conflict.

Sigh. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

See Mick Stevens' most excellent New Yorker cartoon from April 18, 1994 on khakis and Gap's consumer culture.

Update, 9 October 2006: See Slate's article (by Daniel Gross) on Wal-Mart's Republican-leaning corporate suits' program to encourage the company's 1.3 million employees (that fit the Democratic Party's demographic) to vote.

Will the Real Ben Franklin....?

2006-09-11T15:05:00.000-04:00

Folks, Target Corporation has corrected its Web site. "Reagan" is now "Ronald Reagan" and Benjamin Franklin Roosevelt is no longer a presidential (in) action figure! Rather, he has reverted to being good ol' Benjamin Franklin and, likely due to the many, many blogs that noted Target's revisionist history, is sold out! The figure is accurately described on other commercial Web sites, so the fact that the figure is sold out means that many took the risk that this figure could be redefined as a collectible. So it looks like the error is Target's, and not the manufacturer's.

For those of you who missed it, follow this link to saved version (PDF file)--the comments are hilarious.

Never fear, you who must crave more Ben. Just in time for Halloween, you can purchase the "Adult Ben Franklin Costume--Standard" as well as the child-size version. Strange that Ben never changed the style of his rather fashionable clothing, even when he was a poor abused apprentice in his older brother's printing shop. Only the tricorner hat has been replaced with a grey wig. And what's with the kid's shadow?

Target's (Non)Sense of History

2006-09-04T09:07:00.000-04:00

Presidential Action Figures: bad enough. Target online is selling a male doll with long white locks and colonial garb as "Franklin Roosevelt." Looks like Benjamin Franklin to me, unless this is a version depicting one of FDR's and ER's costume parties (there's one photo of FDR et al. dressed in "Classical" dress that made the rounds in the late 1970s during the heyday of Animal House toga parties.)

Target's confusion isn't new to the production of figurines commemorating Revolutionary-era heroes, though it is the first instance I know of confusing historical personages several centuries apart. Not new is believing Benjamin Franklin a president (according to a few of my students' midterm examinations). The Staffordshire potteries of England burned bright meeting the demand for ceramic statuettes of Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the Marquis de Lafayette after the Revolutionary War and into the nineteenth century. Errors abounded: Franklin and Jefferson, in particular, were often confused in portraiture, whether as an engraving or as a ceramic figure. As an intern at Independence National Historical Park, I researched several often mistitled Staffordshire figures of great Americans.

Veronica Moriarty writes of Staffordshire figures for the American market:

there is a core group of figures with undeniable American content, but these were potted in small numbers for a domestic sale because of their newsworthiness to the British pottery-purchasing public. Foremost in the select coterie must be George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Some versions of these figures are interchangeable, distinguishable only by the title, with the mold even having been used for a third figure: "Old English Gentleman". One theory for the third title is the unpopularity of the United States in Britain during the 1850s — the potters wanted to sell their figure and re-titling was an easy way to improve salability.
Were these figures created with an American market considered as anything other than a "bonus", the re-titling would never have occurred, as sales would have been assured. Several smaller versions of Franklin and Washington exist, most notably a rare and beautifully modeled one by the "Alpha Factory". A very rare figure tentatively identified as Thomas Jefferson by some scholars, based on its likeness to a portrait, has yet to be confirmed as such, but demonstrates the current eagerness to find "American" figures that has resulted in numerous questionable identifications, including that of a figure, mostly likely a French soldier, being identified as a Confederate private.

Mass production = mass confusion = bad historical knowledge? More puzzling is Target's logic: its other "presidental action figures" include Washington and Jefferson. Okay. But the other figures are presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon (with the trademark raised arms and fingers in the "V" mode), Jimmy Carter (with dark hair, noticed by an observant commentator), Ronald Reagan (unlike the rest of the figures, only termed "Reagan"), George W. Bush, and the current resident of the White House (Action figure?).

Target's description of Presidential Action Figures:

• Talking Action Figure has a 4 min. audio chip allowing it to speak 25 different phrases in the Presidents own Voice!
• Figures are limited in production and include an individually numbered certificate of authenticity
• Figures also include a biographical pamphlet that includes rare photos and a comprehensive timeline specific to each figure.
• Figures come dressed in period correct clothing that has been hand tailored to suit the figure
• Figure come in an attractive display box however, the figures also include a fully adjustable doll stand for displaying the figure outside of the box

PHOTOS of eighteenth-century patriots! And AUDIO of their voices! Jefferson supposedly possessed a high-pitched voice--what would Benjamin Franklin's voice sounded like? Now we know!

Thank goodness "Franklin Roosevelt" isn't a bobblehead. The one who did become president did veto legislation, after all.

CFP: Field of Vision: The Material and Visual Culture of New England, 1600-1830

2006-08-30T15:22:00.000-04:00

The Colonial Society of Massachusetts and

The Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society

Fields of Vision: The Material and Visual Culture of

New England, 1600-1830

November 9 & 10, 2007
Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts

It has been twenty-five years since the path-breaking exhibition New England Begins opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The exhibit, and its comprehensive three-volume catalogue, brought new scholarly attention to the art, artifacts and built environment of early New England. Since that time, the discipline of material culture has matured, while the emerging field of visual culture has brought new methods and genres to bear on the study of images, objects, landscapes and the technologies that shaped them. This two-day conference, sponsored by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society, will assess new approaches to the material and visual culture of New England. Reflecting the scholarly trends that have emerged in the past quarter century, the conference will extend the chronological scope of inquiry to embrace the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and will explicitly address the innovative work being done in the field of visual culture. We particularly welcome proposals that address Native American and African-American material and visual culture as well as proposals that engage broad theoretical, methodological, and historiographical approaches.

The conference committee will consider individual submissions as well as panels with three papers and a moderator/commentator. Two-page proposals accompanied by a two-page c.v. for each presenter should be sent via electronic mail to Georgia B. Barnhill, curator of graphic arts at the American Antiquarian Society (Gbarnhill@mwa.org). For further information, please contact Martha McNamara (McNamara@maine.edu) or Georgia Barnhill. The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2006.

Georgia B. Barnhill

Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts
American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
(508) 471-2173
(508) 753-3311 (fax)
gbarnhill@mwa.org; www.americanantiquarian.org

My Pet Rock, My Pet Roomba

2006-06-03T11:28:00.000-04:00

My pal Susan Spellman tells me I'm ranting too much about the Smithsonian. Fair enough. So something a bit different:

One can state with certainty that the Smithsonian will add the Roomba to its collections. (Got ya, Susan!) But will it add its clothing? Yes, indeed, one can now cover the Roomba's naked modern design with snuggly, domestic animal costumes, as well as acquire a birth certificate for it! "My Roombud" sells costumes that renders your vacuum cleaner into a pet: Roobit the Frog, Slops the Pig, Roor the Tiger, Mooba the Cow, and FooFoo the WereRabbit.

Oddly, there's also a nonpet, Lucky the Ladybug. Even more oddly (or not), there's the object of the male gaze, Roombette, the French Maid. Ooh. La. La.

Here's the manufacturer's pitch, one that cures your personality flaws or loneliness with some consumer lovin' (www. myroombud.com):

If you own a Roomba, you know what I am talking about. Have you ever:

named your Roomba?
talked to your Roomba?
spent more time watching your Roomba than it would take you to vacuum the room(ba)?
bought a second Roomba so your first would not be lonely?

If you answered yes to any of the above, you are a prime candidate for an original RoomBud Roomba costume! At least one RoomBud is being adopted every day by loving Roomba owners ... but this is not fast enough! With over 1,500,000 naked Roombas out there in the world, it will take 4,109 years and 215 days to cloth all those cold, shivering, embarrassed Roombas at this pace. Please do you part and help us. No more naked Roombas!

Don't you feel sorry for the Roomba's designers? So much work into the sleek design, only to be covered with a form of Christo-kitsch cuteness. This totally reminds me of my late mother's penchant for covering toilet paper rolls and kitchen appliances in coordinating, crocheted covers. Hide that technology when at home! Really, "sleek" never works in American homes. Art Deco, for example, seems to appear mostly in apartments and Hollywood films in the 1930s.

The Family Claim

2006-05-08T11:29:00.000-04:00

"Lord Buckingham" has been arrested by British authorities! Actually, he appears to be American Charlie Stopford, who disappeared 23 years ago and who is remembered for his "large collection of Beatles records and ability to perfectly mimic British speech." And he was arrested over a year ago. According to the Washington Post, this apparent sufferer of Beatlemania

had passed himself off as Lord Buckingham in British society for close to 20 years, marrying, fathering two children, writing notes on stationery bearing a family coat of arms.

Stationery rather than silver; ephemera rather than the substance. Readers of Thomas Hardy's 1891 novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, learn very early that the Durbeyfields are the authentic family line. Impostor"cousin" Alexander Stoke-d'Urberville only knows the coat of arms; he hasn't any material possession proving aristocratic lineage. Tess Durbeyfield's family does:

"Mother asked me to come," Tess continued; "and, indeed, I was in the mind to do so myself likewise. But I did not think it would be like this. I came, sir, to tell you that we are of the same family as you."

"Ho! Poor relations?"

"Yes."

"Stokes?"

"No; d'Urbervilles."

"Ay, ay; I mean d'Urbervilles."

"Our names are worn away to Durbeyfield; but we have several proofs that we are d'Urbervilles. Antiquarians hold we are,--and--and we have an old seal, marked with a ramping lion on a shield, and a castle over him. And we have a very old silver spoon, round in the bowl like a little ladle, and marked with the same castle. But it is so worn that mother uses it to stir the pea-soup."

"A castle argent is certainly my crest," said he blandly. "And my arms a lion rampant."

"And so mother said we ought to make ourselves beknown to you--as we've lost our horse by a bad accident, and are the oldest branch o' the family."

Writing when new wealth was creating faux aristocrats in England and in the United States, Hardy distinguished between the real property of inherited rank and representational--and thus manipulatable--status symbols. Patina--the signs of wear and usage--marks both Tess's last name and the objects signifying the family's claim. Alexander, her "cousin," can only assert his claim through knowledge of the crest and arms. His claim is all about money--"argent," of course, being French for "silver" and "money." "Where rank had titles and ribbons," writes historian Raymond Williams in Keywords, "status has symbols" (1983, pp. 299-300).

The desire for status could be said to center in the dining room--specifically, on the dining room table as well as the office of the seal. Tess's worn spoon tells the tale. Proper dining etiquette in the late nineteenth century was a test of one's social worthiness. Dining included the appropriate uses of the many tools newly created in the era with which to eat grapefruit and tomatoes, to serve macaroni and asparagus, to cut ice cream (with a hatchet!), to slice and eat fish. Dining, and not mere eating for nourishment, was a ritual in which social status was proved, every night, promptly at 6.

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum explores the relationship of status and dining in its new exhibition, "Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500-2005." As the New York Times reporter Julia Moskin observes in her piece on the exhibition, "Knowing what these instruments were and how to use them became a badge of membership in the newly wealthy middle class." She quotes manners maven Emily Post's famous observation, "'No rule of etiquette is of less importance than what fork we use'" ("A Tool for Every Treat," 26 April 2006).

I'm not sure "Lord Buckingham" will be attending the exhibition, alas; he's likely making do with a spork (combination spoon and fork) in jail.

The exhibition began on 5 May and will be on view until 29 October 2006. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is located at 2 East 91st Street, New York, NY.

Further Reading:

Ames, Kenneth L. Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), chapter 2

Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture (lovely, lovely, lovely--etiquette alert: don't read while eating lest you drop something on the magazine's exquisite pages)

Grover, Kathryn, ed. Dining in America, 1850-1900 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987)

Kasson, John F. Rudeness & Civility: Manners in 19th-Century Urban America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990)

Williams, Susan. Savory Suppers & Fashionable Feasts: Dining in Victorian America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996)

"Why Do We Hold Our Knife The Way We Do?" Chicago Tribune, 12 April 2006 (grammar query, Trib editor: shouldn't that be "knives"?)

CFP: Imagining Environments: Navigating Space and Place in the Early Atlantic World

2006-04-16T08:57:00.000-04:00

The Second James L. and Shirley A. Draper Graduate Student Conference on Early American Studies at the University of Connecticut and Mystic Seaport, September 28-30, 2006

The early Atlantic world evokes images of Basque fishermen hand lining off the shores of Nova Scotia, Africans harvesting sugar cane in Barbados, hogs rooting through mussel beds on Cape Cod, a peddler selling Bibles on a Philadelphia street corner, Navajo women hustling sheep across the Rio Grande. Such images are at the heart of exciting new scholarship.

Encouraging innovative research on both real and imagined environments, both this conference and our Pulitzer prize-winning keynote speaker, Alan Taylor, seek to explore reconstructions and representations of space and place across the Atlantic world. Taylor’s William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic and his recent work, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution, offer models for such inquiry, tracing the contests over territory, power, and culture in the borderlands of the Northeast.

The University of Connecticut History Department and Mystic Seaport: The Museum of America and the Sea invite graduate students to submit paper proposals for the Second James L. and Shirley A. Draper Graduate Student Conference on Early American Studies, to be held in Storrs and Mystic, Connecticut from September 28-30, 2006. This conference welcomes interdisciplinary approaches to the Americas and the Atlantic world from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth-centuries. Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

Public and private spaces from New England Town Squares to Portuguese slave ships

Experiencing religious, spiritual, and other transformative environments

Mapping the oceans, cities, and farmlands of the Americas

Development of community identity within racial, gendered, and class-conscious spaces

Native, European, and African conceptions of the environment

The relationship between technology, science, and space

Staple crop agriculture, early industrialization, and environmental consequences

Submission Guidelines:
All submissions must be received by May 5, 2006.

Notifications of acceptance will be made by June 15, 2006. Interested graduate students should submit a 200-300 word abstract and brief C.V. Please submit materials electronically in Word format and include “Draper Conference” in the subject line.

Please send proposals or comments to:

Chad Reid
chad.reid@uconn.edu

The Friends' (of American Studies) List

2006-03-13T09:29:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time I was managing editor of American Quarterly, the scholarly journal of the American Studies Association. Still in graduate school and rather wide-eyed and earnest (I'm still earnest), I decided that the only way to be a managing editor of a scholarly journal in the field I wished to enter was to read the entire run of the journal--at that point, some 40-odd years' worth!

Fascinating reading! (Really.) What was more fascinating, though, was that in the early years of American Studies (the journal was founded two years before the ASA) more than the usual American Studies suspects in History and Literature sat on the journal's editorial board and published in its pages. Sociologists wrote on popular music and football. When Frannie, one of my work-study students, read that anthropologist Margaret Mead was a member of the editorial board, I responded with "No! Tell me Samoa!" (Bad. I know. But you aren't paying me, right? And give me credit for some quick thinking there.)

Other board members came from beyond the university gates. That doesn't happen much any more--you may find a member of the ASA executive council or the AQ board from a museum, but it's usually just one. I don't think a librarian, or a preservationist, or an independent newspaper or magazine columnist or a civic leader has served. Though the ASA touts its outreach to secondary schools and communities, its internal structure makes such outreach dependent on the force of president or a three-person committee who are elected or appointed to terms. For any sustained engagement with the public the ASA has to build up its central office staff with individuals dedicated to such initiatives.

I much appreciated former ASA president Michael Frisch's initiative at the 2000 annual meeting in Detroit. Panels there, as well as other activities, engaged university-unaffiliated scholars. Helen Sheumaker and I created a panel on secondhand material culture that included Al Hoff and Abigail Grotke. More Helen's idea than mine, but I have been a great beneficiary of that idea. I was introduced to individuals who are witty, intelligent, and think broadly about American culture. After creating a zine and Web site on the topic (see tinyrat.com), Al Hoff wrote Thrift Score: The Stuff, the Method, the Madness (1997) and Abigail Grotke, who works at the Library of Congress, has just published Miss Abigail's Guide to Dating, Mating & Marriage (2006), based on her Web site Miss Abigail's Time Warp Advice (www.missabigail.com) . The session was terrific: funny and serious, all at the same time!

I also connected with Lynn Peril, whose zine Mystery Date: One Gal's Guide to the Good Stuff led to a Web site and to her first book Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons (2002; see www.pinkthink.com). Lynn came to Kent State for Women's History Month and her talk attracted more than the usual campus crowd--we were gratified with the attendance numbers. My students in American Women's History loved the book--pitched just right, humorous, but with a critical edge that works. Lynn's new work, College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-eds, Then and Now, will appear in August 2006. Lynn, a Pushcart Prize nominee, writes the Bust magazine column, "The Museum of Femoribilia."

American Studies, in its quest for academic legitimacy, forgot that others beyond the academy practice the craft as well. Those of us who "do" material culture know that. But we've no longer the numbers in the ASA nor does ASA court consistently those writers and curators and activists and leaders who hold common cause with those university-affiliated scholars who see American Studies as cultural critique and an agent of change.

Heroic Preservation

2005-12-18T10:26:00.000-05:00

The USS Constitution is fake from the waterline up. And even under the waterline. Okay, not really fake, in the sense of trying to pass off something for what it is not. Does the ship have a deceptive appearance? No. Is it not genuine or authentic? Depends. "Old Ironside's" parts have been replaced over time to preserve its overall form, its accessibility, and most importantly, its historic and symbolic roles for and in American history.

How many visitors think they are trodding on the frigate's original deck? Does the fact that the ship is still in commission in the US Navy mitigate visitors' belief?

All things, we know in this Christmas consumer season, are always in a state of repair if things are in a state of use. It's only when an object is no longer used or somehow relevant that Americans begin to think about its original state or, barring that possibility, the object's state of greatest relevance. Families keep creased or taped or tattered photos, for example, though digital photography can render those images perfect again--as copies that are also originals. Oy! This is getting confusing. But it's still preservation of a sort: fake, but affectively or symbolically real.

Two essays in Slate got me a'thinkin' about preservation, original intent, ruins, repair, and my favorite creased photo of my parents: Inigo Thomas's "Among the Ruins," about how ruins help us repair--that is, put in order--and how we must witness for ourselves ruins such as Stonehenge and the World Trade Center Towers, and "Rot in Peace," a slide show by Caitlin DesSilvey. The images explore the new habitats that are allowed when buildings and other manmade sites are allowed to decay. As DeSilvey writes, " Decay erases certain histories. But it can release other stories about place and ecology that would otherwise go untold."

I'm not as well versed in the literature of historic preservation as a material culture scholar should be, but I haven't really read much on the notion of repair rather than restore--the latter meaning to "return to its original or usable and functioning condition." Preservation is heroic in the latter form: to restore is to rescue once an object's relationship to its original/intended meaning is considered "dead," whether through imminent physical threat or disuse. Repair, in comparison, is passive, allowing for change and the possibility that that object will be ultimately consumed and disappear.

Further Reading:

Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. The Necessity for Ruins, and Other Topics. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

Poff, Chrys M. “The Western Ghost Town in American Culture, 1869-1950.” Ph.D. dissertation University of Iowa 2004.

Call For Papers: Everyday stuff

2005-11-12T10:02:00.000-05:00

Everyday stuff: narrating the social lives of material objects

The Culture of Cities Project is pleased to announce its call for papers for its panel “Everyday stuff: narrating the social lives of material objects”, to take place during the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (CSAA) at York University, Toronto.

As silent protagonists of our everyday lives, mundane objects simultaneously escape and fascinate the scholar, who seeks to turn their apparent irrelevance, inertness and muteness into phenomena worthy of detailed consideration. We are particularly interested in contributions in the form of case studies from both graduate students and established scholars who aim at discovering mundane things and their (contested) use as occasions for research into the interpretive complexity of the structure of everyday life. A list of topics includes, but is not restricted to:

Tools and technologies
Architecture and infrastructure
Landscapes and monuments
Amenities
Clothing, food and other consumer goods
Domestic and public furniture

Paper proposals should include the title of the paper, name, institutional affiliation and e-mail address of the author(s), as well as an abstract of no more than 500 words. The deadline for proposals is December 31st, 2005. Authors will be notified of their participation by January 31st, 2006.

Please, direct submissions to: Diego Llovet (dllovet@yorku.ca), Department of Sociology, York University Toronto, Canada

Martha Stewart Living Well Is The Best Revenge

2005-09-25T11:12:00.000-04:00

When Martha Stewart was convicted of kindasortamaybe what she hadn't been accused of or maybe actually did (the case is under appeal), my pal Pamela Potter-Hennessey emailed to tell me that she was planning on buying 10 shares of MSO in protest of the verdict and in support of a wronged smart and successful woman. My friend Sarah Leavitt wrote that she and some of her friends visited Kmart and bought Martha Stewart's soapmaking kit. I liked both ideas, so I bought some very nice black towels (on sale at Kmart--was the verdict timed to the sale, or vice versa?) and 10 shares of MSO stock at $10.50 a share. My first stock purchase besides whatever those guys at TIAA-CREF decide to do with my retirement funds. (Note to self: look into what they are indeed deciding with my yet-to-be-built beachhouse.)

Boy, am I happy now. Martha's back, the stock price isn't bouncing around as much and has more than doubled. Yes, Wall Street prognosticators (all white, all male, nearly all the time) say that the stock is overvalued. Yes, television critics (all white, all male, nearly all the time) are divided about Martha's new television shows. (I don't like reality shows, so I haven't tuned in to Trump's nor Martha's "Apprentice" series. Note to The Donald and Martha and producer Mark Burnett: don't let your crop of competitors read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. He escaped his apprenticeship with his older brother in Boston and invented the original American success story. Luck and pluck, rags to riches, etc., etc. Reading said book could lead to a boardroom coup. Now THAT'S good television!)

Christopher Byron, all-white, all-male, all-of-the-time business writer, skewered Stewart with his rather nasty and under-researched book, Martha Inc. He declared, after Stewart was charged, that "She's toast!" on E! Television's show or A&E's Biography show about Stewart. I just don't think Wall Street gets the phenomenon that is Martha Stewart. Her show is canceled on network; she goes to cable. Her radio show is canceled; she goes to Sirius. Ad pages are up 48% in the third quarter than a this time last year. MSLO has purchased and created other magazines; merchandising remains solid. The company has cash reserves.

Is it that the men of Wall Street (and the women who want to be like them) just assume that women will fail at some point? That's also an American story: Horatio Alger's tales tell of boys with aptitude and the unexpected intervention of a mentor guaranteeing that said boys will go far; there is no parallel story for women in American fiction and film --at least any that has the happy, successful, and appropriate ending. Rather we get ruined, ravaged, reputation-destroyed women. Dreiser's Sister Carrie's only capital is her body, not her mind. Successful Mildred Pierce wasn't a good enough wife and mother resulting in her daughter murdering Pierce's second husband.

The federal government measures the well-being of the economy as well as the American family by charting monthly national housing construction starts. Well, someone needs to provide the secondary goods: paint, furniture, kitchen appliances, etc. And the feds ignore the secondhand market that Martha Stewart and her epigones have so thoroughly capitalized on: repairing and restoring and updating old houses, adding on to houses, and the like. Look at eBay, for Pete's sake! What does that phenomenon tell you about the secondhand economy of the nation?

Stewart's resurrection has been fascinating. From the counter-perp walk from her car to the private jet after her prison release in the wee hours of the morning (for which she prepared by having her hair colored and styled while still at Camp Cupcake), to the appearance of Diddy on her new talk show (calculated to comment on the fact that Stewart was known as "M. Diddy" whilst in jail), to her recent appearance on Letterman in which she jokes about her incarceration (in "Yale"), Stewart continues to utilize her original concept: making her life and style central to the brand. For all the Wall Street seers who argued that the brand was tarnished because her personal reputation was, well: Eat some toast. For Martha, eat some French toast. Everyone has an un-success story. Another American myth imbedded in fiction and film: there is redemption.

Martha Stewart launched a revolution (or at least has become its leader) in lifestyle consumption. In some ways her imitators, though competitors for market share, have ensured that that market would be there when Stewart returned. So many were used to Stewart's business plan of innovating and creating that they did not consider how merely a holding strategy would work to advantage future growth. So many Wall Street "gurus" don't understand that consumers are smart about what they buy, whether they support Stewart or not. But heck! I've only a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Penn, not an MBA from Penn's Wharton School--Trump's alma mater.

Historic, Historical, Potayto, Potahto

2005-08-09T11:37:00.000-04:00

Tourists to American's national historic/al parks and to museums don't seem to "get" the distinction between "historic" and "historical." I quoteth from the American Heritage Dictionary:

Historic and historical have different usages, though their senses overlap. Historic refers to what is important in history: the historic first voyage to the moon. It is also used of what is famous or interesting because of its association with persons or events in history: a historic house. Historical refers to whatever existed in the past, whether regarded as important or not: a minor historical character. Historical also refers to anything concerned with history or the study of the past: a historical novel; historical discoveries. While these distinctions are useful, these words are often used interchangeably, as in historic times or historical times.

Museums of a certain vintage, though, have blurred that distinction through the installation of "period rooms" predominantly based on style and region. And for art museums, that's just fine. Yet the period room idea is so prevalent that its logic has been applied in other sorts of museums. A sort of weird symbiosis between style and periodization occurs without consideration of other political, economic, and social forces at play. It's all rather insular and not a wee bit circular. Historic artifacts become historical, telling the story of style over all other possible stories, even in historic houses dedicated to a famous person or event.

The traditional period room may be a workable strategy to display decorative arts in seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, before the rise of mass transportation, production, and consumption, but it doesn't work well when it comes to imagining twentieth-century interiors that are not tied tightly to corroborating evidence (photos, wills, inventories, etc.) of an owner. Add to the dilemma the rise of decorating manuals, magazines, and a whole host of prescriptive "shelter" literature and we blur another distinction between ideal interiors and real practice.

So it's just terrific that the Philadelphia Museum of Art is hosting a symposium entitled "The Museum and the American 'Period Room': Past, Present and Future," 16-17 September 2005.
Here's the description:

The "period room" was a core principle of the installation of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in its new building, completed in 1928 under the legendary direction of Fiske Kimball. An architectural historian, Kimball believed in the power of the object seen in context, and he gathered historic interiors and architectural elements to complement the Museum's growing collection of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts.

This symposium will address the phenomenon of the historic architectural installation in American museums over the past century, using case studies from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Winterthur to track shifting trends in taste and scholarship. Closer study of the American historic rooms at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will follow, to reveal changes in installation and interpretation over time. The symposium will close with a look at future architectural installations planned for the Museum's expanded American galleries and a discussion of the role of such interiors in modern museum practice.

Information on speakers, topics, schedule, registration, and fees is available at http://www.philamuseum.org/education/symposia.shtml.

(American) Material Culture Happenings

2005-08-07T10:15:00.000-04:00

In no particular order:

"Cultures of eBay: Making Sense of Social and Economic Aspects of the eBay 'Phenomenon,'" 24-25 August 2005, University of Essex, Colchester, UK (punning is alive and well and living in the ivory tower--see titles)
http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/culturesofebay.html

"American Servitude: The Southern Experience." Maymont, 16-17 September 2005. In conjunction with the opening of "In Service and Beyond: Domestic Life and Work in a Gilded Age Mansion," Richmond, VA
www.maymont.org

"Domesticity and Design in the Gilded Age: Salve Regina University 9th Annual Conference on Culture and Historic Preservation, 29-30 September and 1 October 2005, Newport, RI
http://www.salve.edu/heritage/annualconferences/2005/

"Producing Fashion," Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, Hagley Museum and Library, 28-29 October 2005, Wilmington DE
http://www.hagley.org/center-2005-fashion.html

"Locating Design," Design History Annual Conference, 7-9 September 2005, London, UK
http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/research/$-the-design-history-society-annual-conference.cfm

"Interior Insights: Design, Ethnography and the Home" Symposium, 24-25 November 2005, Royal College of Art, London, UK
http://www.rca.ac.uk/csdi/

This Old House

2005-07-22T10:29:00.000-04:00

The house has been, remarkably, a pretty stable marker of American success and social identity. Historic houses tell that story for the most part through the buildings' affiliation with "Great Men." For example, presidential birthplaces and/or final homes, except in a few instances, are preserved or re-created or marked, all in the belief that these dwellings and their furnishings tell us something about the men who owned and inhabited these (often modest) buildings. Ronald Reagan has not only a birthplace (Tampico, IL) but a boyhood home (Dixon, IL) and an entire Reagan Trail throughout Illinois. There's something personal and idyllic about designating a place in which to describe how the boy became the man; retrofitting a story of success (and therefore character) via domestic material culture. Mad magazine skewered the "Great Man" myth by throwing out this first line in a foreword: "I was born in a log cabin I helped my father build." Now that's a rags to riches biography!

So there's a sort of historic house museum that is more shrine than history. Other house museums are dedicated to social history, telling the visitor of "how it was like back then." "Back then" is often the pre-industrial past. "Everyday life" is, more often than not, "everyday labor" at sites such as Colonial Williamsburg, Sturbridge Village, Old Salem, and Conner Prairie. If the site uses historical characters, those characters tend to be moral and frugal and hardworking. As a result, visitors learn or assume that a character's story ends happily: history here endorses the mythic American dream.

The reward of work at these sites are symbolized in prominently displayed status possessions and gifts. Christmas makes an annual if ahistorical appearance as a means of generating income for these sites, even though the holiday was not celebrated as the consumer extravaganza it came to be in the late nineteenth century. Festive occasions, especially at living history museums, are the result of hard labor. I've always wondered how much fun a barn-raising actually was and how much energy the participants actually had at the end of the day. Having worked on mere house remodeling jobs, I can state with conviction that cooking, dancing, singing, and even simple conversation were all well beyond my capabilities by nightfall. (Although some of the guys at Home Depot bore uncanny resemblances to the dancing and singing barnraisers in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Perhaps they'd be able to cut a rug after ... cutting a rug.)

Americans are now grappling with how to understand the industrial past in our postindustrial service economy. The Youngstown Historical Center of Labor and Industry is one attempt; the preservation of the Bethlehem Steel Plant in the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor is another. The Henry Ford Museum has updated Henry Ford's Colonial Revival Greenfield Village by including a tour historicizing the current production of F-150 trucks at the Ford Rouge Factory. (Yes, Walter Reuther and the UAW and the 1937 Battle of the Overpass are included in the story. The Museum's short history of the Rouge adopts an episodic approach and divides the plant's story into a sort of pre-history of the eccentric Henry Ford and the workers leading to the events of 1937, and a more progressive, community-minded, and altogether make-nice story after Ford's death in 1947. Harrumph.)

Nevertheless, historic houses, due to their constancy (one understands "house-ness"), remain for many the measures of change and the guarantors of an "authentic" past. When it comes to America's industrial Gilded Age, though, we are more often treated to the extraordinary. The era's "captains of industry" built opulent mansions that have, until recently, celebrated wealth via an owner's fine taste in furnishing or an architect's greatness. These captains' families may have experienced tragedy, but overall their good fortune (both financially and socially) is told through stories of family togetherness and charitability, and of business acumen rather than ruthlessness. (Ida Tarbell's father wasn't too fond of John D. Rockefeller. And some Pittsburghers whose ancestors participated in the Homestead Strike of 1892 will still not set foot in Clayton, the Henry Clay Frick Mansion. The website doesn't mention the strike of the attempted assassination attempt on Frick in his home.)

Gilded Age house museums, whether truly opulent or imitative (as in the variety of middle-class Victorian houses that appear to modern eyes as overly ornate), have increasingly offered "behind the scenes" and "nooks and crannies" tours. Rather than monuments to success (and, in some cases, excess), these houses are being reinterpreted to include those "below stairs"--servants. Those areas dedicated to household work and the workers have been used for storage and office space for museum collections and staff. Now they serve as sites of benign class engagement and offer a form of "backstage" authenticity. Luxury has somehow always been seen as artifice and thus a performance; "real life" is backstage, not onstage. Sociologist Erving Goffman's dramaturgical perspectives have proved extremely useful in historic house interpretation; the interplay of space ("performance regions") and an actor's social role (including gesture, dress, and props) are easily scripted using historical evidence such as etiquette guides, letters, diaries, images, and the like.

Two Gilded Age mansions have announced new "additions" to the houses. Biltmore House, George W. Vanderbilt's crib and the largest house in the United States, has opened ten rooms dedicated to the interpretation of the 40 servants who kept that 250-room home going. As CNN.com reports,

The newly opened rooms offer visitors a sense of life behind the scenes at Biltmore, which was completed in 1895 by George Washington Vanderbilt III, a grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad and shipping tycoon. A virtual castle, the home was designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt, modeled after the great chateaus of the Loire Valley.
....
Now, visitors taking the self-guided tour can climb from the third floor's North Tower Room to walk down a wing of the servant's quarters. Hanging in a closet are reproductions of the sort of uniforms worn by Biltmore's housemaids -- a gingham or calico dress by day, followed by a more formal black-and-white dress for nighttime.
The bathrooms, while plain, offered indoor plumbing -- still a luxury in western North Carolina in the early 20th century.
"In a lot of ways, the standard of living for servants was a lot higher then they would have had somewhere else," [curator Darren] Poupore said.

Interestingly, the Biltmore website announces the servants' quarters this way: "Biltmore House just got bigger." Click on the specific webpage on the fourth-floor rooms and the servants' spaces are listed after the observatory designed by architecture Richard Morris Hunt and a room housing Hunt's architectural model of Biltmore. Servants here are discussed as playing roles and occupying spaces. For the most part they are nameless.

Maymont, the 100-acre estate owned by James Henry and Sallie May Dooley, in Richmond, Virginia, has also added a "belowstairs" interpretation. Entitled "In Service and Beyond: Domestic Work and Life in a Gilded Age Mansion," this effort goes beyond the sort of role-playing interpretation other historic house museums have adopted. The guest curator, Elizabeth O'Leary, has balanced the tightrope between the "great man" history that such houses espouse (the website links Dooley as a contemporary to Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt) and social history that engages class and race.

Maymont House witnessed a dynamic interplay between employer and employee, upper-class and working-class individuals, white and black, old and young. This relationship was played out against a background of rapidly changing domestic technology. It was also set in the turbulent social and political landscape of a strictly segregated South.

Restoration of Maymont's kitchen, wine cellar, laundry, butler's bedroom, maids' bedroom, butler's pantry, and other service areas is planned. Through eight period rooms and a new permanent exhibition, visitors will meet specific employees and consider their lives in and outside the workplace. They will be able to examine an era of dramatically changing household technology. And they can learn the historical context of domestic service in Gilded Age Richmond, the South, and the United States.

The project, which included Maymont servants' descendants, explores how these domestic workers lived "beyond" their work in Richmond, at a time (1897) when Richmond had one servant for every thirteen residents.

Maymont's domestic employees met the challenges of running an elaborate estate, but they were much more than the sum and substance of their duties. Behind the scenes, they were individuals with their own skills, personalities, goals, and challenges. And, upon leaving Maymont's gates, they took pride, a work ethic, and modest wages into the community to raise families, support businesses and churches, and to help build today's Richmond.

Unlike Biltmore's interpretation, Maymont's servants are named and not restricted to the spaces that define them solely in relation to their employer. History rather than hagiography. Huzzah!

The interest in servants' lives continues the fascination Americans have in how people work. The inclusion of servants' labors and lives into the traditional narrative of "Great Man" history is the result of the New Social History and its emphasis on "ordinary" and "marginalized" men and women.

Historic house museums in the "Great Man" mode are really biographical, in that these houses strive to portray the primary inhabitant in a specific time as well have that person's life mean something more than a life lived, often by citing achievement over social, economic, or even self-made obstacles. So, in some ways, the more traditional way of telling great men's lives is being applied to those who have historically gone unnoticed.

But now biography is celebrity(think A&E's Biography Channel), and celebrity itself demands its own rules--or lack thereof--concerning what should be seen and unseen. Biography seems secure, though. Bill Clinton's boyhood home will never need to tackle the difficult issues of his personal life made vividly public during his presidency.

Further reading:
On domestic servitude, see David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), and Faye Dudden, Serving Women (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1985). On women's unpaid labor in the home, see Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

On historic house museums, see Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America's Historic House Museums (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999).

Jennifer Pustz's doctoral dissertation on early twentieth-century domestic servitude and historic house museum interpretation taps into and explicates the dilemma of the role and real when it comes to servants: "The Servant Problem: Historic House Museums and Social History," Ph.D. diss. University of Iowa 2004.

Charlotte Smith's doctoral dissertation explored the dilemma of "Great Man" history and social history in historic house museum interpretation: "The House Enshrined: Great Man and Social History House Museums in the United States and Australia," Ph.D. thesis University of Canberra 2002. Dr. Smith also edited a special issue of Open Museum Journal, entitled "Interpreting Historic House Museums."

On the interplay of space and authenticity, see Erving Goffmann, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959) and Dean McCannell, "Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings," American Journal of Sociology 3 (1973): 589-603. McCannell's The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976) extends the discussion.

Revenge of the Beanie Babies

2005-07-18T10:59:00.000-04:00

Tom Vanderbilt's essay in Slate, "Self Storage Nation" (18 July 2005) tells the tale of Americans' new form of inconspicuous consumption. Self storage is going upscale!

Not so long ago, IKEA--the Swedish home furnishings superstore--conducted an ad campaign based on this simple observation: "It's a big country; someone has to furnish it." I find the furniture rather uncomfortable, but I think that what really attracted Americans to IKEA was IKEA's dedication to household stuff management: even its living room groupings had storage units beyond the now-ubiquitous entertainment center. As the IKEA website observes in its corporate timeline, "1978: IKEA brings storage shelves into the living room, which greatly upsets tidy people at first. But soon they learn to appreciate just how tidy IVAR storage units can make a room." And what college student or bright young professional tidy person hasn't invested in Billy bookcases? (You over there--raise your hand. I know you have Billy in the bedroom.) (Cheap joke. Life is short, though, and I, as a not-so-tidy person, reserve the right to succumb to the moment.)

Well, now all that stuff threatens to burst those IVAR storage units, jam drawers, and clutter closets. What's a confirmed consumer to do?

Self storage. An odd phrase, especially to those of us who study possessions as clues to American culture in time and space. Things, we have asserted, have a way of negotiating the self and the larger world; they provide evidence of social status claims, worldly knowledge, humans' social reciprocity. But what if the things we study are stored? Should we have a theory of "inconspicuous consumption"?

Self storage facilities now dot the American landscape, on the edges of college towns and big cities and along highways and around airports--just the same cheap real estate that IKEA and antique malls have taken advantage of. The land is cheap, the highway convenient, and the price right: hey, if you have more stuff, you likely have more money for rent. Like high school hallway lockers visited in between classes, we've grouped together in these liminal spaces the activities of consuming and storing things while on the move. Either Americans haven't the time to sort their stuff or are moving house too often or haven't yet succumbed to the liberation of yard or moving sales. (There's therapy for that.)

Perhaps the self storage phenomenon is an extension of cocooning. Removing from immediate sight and touch that which we have found useful in the past or idealize for a rosy future preserves that feeling of security or justifies what to others may seem an imprudent purchase. ("I will use that juicer again," Ida vowed tearfully, as she packed the almost new appliance--in its original box--into her mostly empty SUV. "I have just the spot for it in my storage unit. Right next to the bread machine." Her face brightened at the very thought.)

A strange segue, perhaps, but Michael Kimmelman's New York Times essay, "What Price Love? Museums Sell Out" (17 July 2005), offers a righteous critique of American art museums' shift in defining collections (including those in storage) as goods to be marketed rather than as part of the gift economy in which the revered and acclaimed artifacts of America's public and artistic heritage have circulated. As Mr. Kimmelman observes:

Money rules. It always has, of course. But at cultural institutions today, it seems increasingly to corrupt ethics and undermine bedrock goals like preserving collections and upholding the public interest. Curators are no longer making decisions. Rich collectors, shortsighted directors and outside commercial interests are. When the New York Public Library traded away one of the city's great civic treasures, Asher B. Durand's "Kindred Spirits," in a closed auction, for $35 million, the library's curators didn't find out about the sale until hours before the public read about it in the newspaper.

When money rules, institutional memory fades away. Does no one remember when Boston's Museum of Fine Art attempted to sell Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington, only to have the Boston Athenaeum--the rightful owner, who had lent it to MFA--call foul, a call echoed by many Bostonians who wished to have the portrait remain in the city?

Americans depend on their cultural and historical institutions to provide safe havens for those objects considered part of the collective heritage of the nation. Call them "national self" storage units. With integrity. Increasingly, however, those institutions have heard the siren song of cash from wealthy "patrons" who wish to purchase control these institutions' missions. In some ways, these new players buy access to alter the art and antiques market through a new form of (Wall) street cred endowed by affiliation with the nation's major cultural institutions. Kimmelman again:

This is the mindset of Wall Street quarterly earnings reports and the way that many members of museum and library boards are now accustomed to think. They view nonprofits as staid. Collections in storage are underutilized commodities; the booming art market is a golden opportunity; success should be judged by hard numbers. Are attendance and membership up? Is the museum expanding? Is its budget growing? Is the museum getting enough headlines for new acquisitions and blockbusters?

But museums and libraries are not commercial enterprises. Growth is not necessarily good. Expansion is not always wise. Often it's the reverse. True success is measured by hard-to-quantify intangibles: the quality of research and education; the study, care and maintenance of the collections; the level of public trust.

(Aside here: universities are doing the same thing; those of us in History and American Studies know full well that departments and programs who don't redefine themselves as entrepreneurial activities are threatened with downsizing or outright extinction. Administrators, especially those from the sciences aligned more closely with market-think, just don't get it.)

And though we like to criticize the wealthy, those who avail themselves of eBay, or care more for the market value of items spotlighted on Antiques Roadshow, or are entranced by televised poker games are participating in the same mode of thinking. Everything has value to the individual who seeks it; it's that form of consumerism based on the collection that has opened and changed these markets. Whether it's a rare painting or a Beanie Baby or four of a kind collected in a poker hand, how much are you going to pay to see it? How much to raise?

Further reading:
Those scholars who have turned to considering the American house--and American housing--in terms of production rather than display have increasingly investigated storage strategies as means of understanding design and meaning. Mary Anne Beecher's dissertation, "A Place for Everything: The Influence of Storage Innovations on Modern American Domesticity (1900-1955)" (University of Iowa 2003) sees the rise of a "new modern storage repertoire" in the home in relation to the rise of twentieth-century consumerism and its material practices of packaging, efficiency, convenience, and mobility. See her description at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~arh574/Material_Culture_of_Storage.pdf.

More recently, Diane Jacobsohn has found that Boston area three-deckers offered new types of storage and efficiency that may have made these housing forms attractive to the expanding middle class in the years between 1870-1930 (Boston's 'Three-Decker Menace': The Buildings, the Builders and the Dwellers, 1870s-1930," Ph.D. diss. Boston University 2004).

Self storage is not about waste, though trash, waste, etc., have also concerned scholars. Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller wrote about domestic design in terms of waste and elimination in their 1992 work The Bathroom, The Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (Princeton University Press).

The second incarnation of The Bob Newhart Show (when he played a Vermont innkeeper and self-help guide author) offered a hilarious toss off when Bob was doing a radio show. Going to a commercial, the radio announcer introduced the next topic of discussion for the call-in show: "Styrofoam cup: Modern convenience or devil's plaything?" Susan Strasser's Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (Metropolitan Books, 1999) helps answer the question by exploring 200 years of Americans' engagement with using, keeping, discarding, and recycling the stuff of daily living. One's man trash....

Good News from Winterthur

2005-07-15T10:10:00.000-04:00

Good news! Kasey Grier will be teaching at Winterthur beginning this fall. She and Mary Corbin Sies created the ASA's Material Culture Caucus in 1994.

The announcement from Winterthur Director Leslie Bowman:

I am delighted to announce a new appointment to Winterthur’s academic staff. Katherine C. Grier (Kasey) will join us September 1 as a professor in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture (WPEAC). ....
A nationally recognized scholar of American material culture, Kasey is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Public History Program at the University of South Carolina. She is also co-director of the Museum Management Certificate Program and coordinator of academic programs at the McKissick Museum.
Kasey’s research and writing projects focus largely on the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Her current project examines pets as insightful expressions of material culture. Her book, Pets in America: A History will be published by the University of North Carolina Press later this year, and she is serving as guest curator of an accompanying exhibition.
Kasey is well known in and around Winterthur and the University of Delaware. She completed her PhD in the History of American Civilization at the University of Delaware. She has participated in conferences and lectures at both Winterthur and neighboring Hagley Museum and has been published in the Winterthur Portfolio and served as a member of its editorial board. While researching her project on pets, she spent two months at Winterthur on a Fleming Fellowship.

Please join me in welcoming Kasey back to Winterthur!

Of Attics and Museums

2005-07-11T10:13:00.000-04:00

Anne Applebaum’s recent column on the National Museum of American History (“Give This ‘Attic’ A Story To Tell,” Washington Post, 22 June 2005) lays the blame for the Museum’s lack of attention to teaching American history on the venerable institution’s curators. Citing opinion polls that American teenagers’ historical knowledge is next to nil, Ms. Applebaum forwards the idea that the Museum should offer, “in at least one or two permanent exhibitions, something about what actually happened.” After all, she writes, many visitors “won’t go to another history museum again. Ever.”

Surveys tell us otherwise. The nation’s history museums, historians David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig tell us in their 1998 study of the Americans’ understanding and use of the past, are the most trusted of history resources. Their survey reveals that more Americans do go to more than one history museum in their lifetimes.

Most important, perhaps, to the museum experience, Thelen and Rosenzweig found that Americans, regardless of income, race, and education, felt “connected to the past in museums because authentic artifacts seem to transport them straight back to the times when history was being made.” Ms. Applebaum denigrates items of popular culture that bring many Americans to the Museum while proposing George Washington’s authentic candlestick as a possible property of a proposed multimedia, chronological exhibition to replace “dusty displays and dull captions.” By doing so, she inadvertently supports the need for "the real thing" in museum exhibitions, and not reproductions or other media as substitutions. Could it be that many people attend museums because the experience differs from the numbing experience of mass produced imagery in our daily lives?

Yet those selfsame items of popular culture help Americans (and foreign visitors) to place themselves in a larger historical narrative partly of their own, and their family’s, making. Rather than a pronouncement, a single story of “what happened” that would diminish active engagement with the past, the Museum offers its multicultural, cross-generational, American and foreign-born visitors a space in which American history, with all its debates and conflicts, is engaged. How interesting that Ms. Applebaum’s examples of “good” exhibition practice are the non-interactive televisions “blaring” fascist and communist propaganda in Budapest’s museum of totalitarianism.

Nevertheless, I do agree that the Museum does need to reconsider its strategies—but in ways more fundamental to the institution. If Ms. Applebaum had investigated the history and current state of the Museum’s curatorial staff as much as she surveyed the polls of American teenagers’ historical knowledge, she would have uncovered a more complex problem (one that is increasingly shared by many history museums across the nation). Since the “history wars” of the late 1980s and 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution has seen fit not to hire at healthy levels permanent curators and historians, creating a lacuna of experience and knowledge of the collections—knowledge necessary to create the sorts of extensive exhibitions Ms. Applebaum suggests.

The Museum’s current curators, trained in American history and a further specialty that makes them uniquely qualified to care for the collections in their charges, at times have little power to create the exhibits that Ms. Applebaum desires. It's not only that they the adequate physical space to do so. As federal, state, and even philanthropic dollars decline due to strident ideological warfare that exalts privatization over the social contract, museums have turned to corporate and wealthy donors who exact advertisement and tribute as the price of support. (Ms. Applebaum should know that the museum she criticizes is named the “National Museum of American History, Behring Center.” She has also seemingly forgotten the Catherine Reynolds episode of a gift with strings attached.)

Behind the display cases and exhibition walls are curators and historians and archivists best trained to understand the complexities—and indeed, the chronology—of the American past. These same professionals everyday engage the public by answering questions, promoting historical knowledge, and overall making the nation’s past accessible to one and all. Nevertheless, curators are forced to beg for dollars rather than serve the many when it comes to financial support for exhibitions—this at a time when surveys show great support for public funding of museums, historic preservation, and humanities overall.

More than the “nation’s attic,” the National Museum of American History is the “people’s museum,” with all the artifactual cacophony that sobriquet implies. The Museum’s curators, historians, and archivists perform admirably for the people they serve and educate. Rather than cast blame on these dedicated public servants, Ms. Applebaum may wish to investigate the Smithsonian Institution’s current policies favoring privatization and Congress’ willingness to make the museums on the Mall an ideological battlefield as the real obstacles in presenting the real things of the American past.

Further reading:
Edward T. Linenthal, History Wars : The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past
Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory : The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture
Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life
Bob Thompson, "A Tug of War; At the American History Museum, Battle Lines Are Being Drawn Over The 'Price of Freedom' Exhibition," Washington Post, November 7, 2004, 1
Bob Thompson, History For $ale," Washington Post Magazine, January 20, 2002, W14-
Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory

A New Thing

2005-06-29T23:30:00.000-04:00

Welcome to "Object Lessons," a group weblog sponsored by the American Studies Association's Material Culture Caucus. Here we wish to engage the many debates about the study of material life in America, past and present. We seek to include not only scholars and students and curators and collectors and consumers, but also anyone who is interested in American things.

Thanks to Susan Garfinkel for suggesting this blog, and thanks to other members of the Material Culture Caucus Steering Committee, especially Lisa Lock, Simon Bronner, and Meg Mulrooney, for their good works and words.

On behalf of the Caucus,

Shirley Teresa Wajda

yay!

2005-06-29T21:10:00.000-04:00

it's about time one of us started to make this happen! kudos yourself, shirley.