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Date: 2 Jan 96 21:21:32
From: Martin Ann S <[log in to unmask]>
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William and Mary Quarterly, January 1996, Material
Culture in Early America
Contents
"Editor's Note," by Michael McGiffert, Editor, William and Mary
Quarterly
"Material Things and Cultural Meanings: Notes on the Study of
Early American Material Culture," by Ann Smart Martin, Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation
"Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William
Johnson, and the Indian Fashion," by Timothy J. Shannon, SUNY,
Cortland
"The Material World of Cloth: Production and Use in Eighteenth-
Century Rural Pennsylvania," by Adrienne D. Hood, University of
Toronto
"The Search for a New Rural Order: Farmhouses in Sutton,
Massachusetts, 1790-1830," by Nora Pat Small, Eastern Illinois
University
"The Archaeology of African-American Slavery and Material
Culture," by Patricia Samford, University of North Carolina
"Weaving History: Cherokee Baskets from the Springplace Mission,"
by Sarah H. Hill, independent scholar
"Visual Images of Blacks in Early American Imprints," by Barbara
Lacey, Saint Joseph College (Hartford)
The articles presented in this issue exemplify the vitality
of current inquiries into early American material culture and
show how material culture and social history can reinforce and
enrich each other. Individually and as a group, the essays
illuminate the uses and values of material culture for early
American historians.
The study of material culture is about the way people live
their lives through, by, around, in spite of, in pursuit of, in
denial of, and because of the material world. The venture is
premised on the proposition that artifacts are integral to
cultural behavior. Humans use them to create, learn, and mediate
social interaction and relations. Human-made things are far more
than mere tools; they are complex bundles of individual, social,
and cultural meanings grafted onto something that can be seen,
touched, and owned. Such meanings are often unstable: they merge
into and fly out of things.
The goal of "Material Culture in Early America" is to
highlight interrelationships between material culture and social
and cultural history. The articles address a wide range of
topics, from images to objects to archaeology, over a broad swath
of colonial America--New England, New York, Pennsylvania, the
Chesapeake, and Georgia. The authors are interested in forging
links between social history and material culture; their work
moves fluidly across disciplinary lines. Although no gathering of
half-a-dozen articles can claim to represent the depth and
breadth of material culture studies today, this issue offers a
sampler of topics and approaches from the forefront of material
culture scholarship. The guest editor for this special issue was
Ann Smart Martin.
The issue divides roughly into two groups that reflect the
broad themes discussed above. In the first group, Timothy
Shannon, Adrienne Hood, and Nora Pat Small show how Americans
negotiated the new world of goods in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries.
The second group, Patricia Samford, Sarah H. Hill, and
Barbara E. Lacey, develop exciting dimensions of American
cultural studies--the construction of geographic and ethnic
borders and the creolization of cultures.
Available for $10.00 (postpaid; Virginia residents add 4.5% sales
tax) from: Institute of Early American History and Culture, P. O.
Box 8781, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8781.
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