History Of Material Culture Research Articles

Historia y Globalización: VIII Conversaciones Internacionales de Historia ed. by Francisco Javier Caspistegui (review)

Reviewed by: Historia y Globalización: VIII Conversaciones Internacionales de Historia ed. by Francisco Javier Caspistegui Felipe Fernández-Armesto Historia y Globalización: VIII Conversaciones Internacionales de Historia. Edited by Francisco Javier Caspistegui. Pamplona: EUNSA, 2012. 328pp. $25.00 (paper). In his contribution to this collection from a gathering at the Universidad de Navarra in 2010, Jerry Bentley promises (p. 254) to go “beyond” the work of “philosophers and political theorists” to the importance of the everyday. This proposal alone makes his paper different from most other offerings in the volume, where the level of analysis is generally so high as to lose sight of real life. The occasion of the meeting was the seventh in a series called “International Conversations on History,” though the format seems to have consisted in a conventional exchange of papers: No procès-verbal is included in the volume, and there is no other hint of any conversation. The editor, Francisco Javier Caspistegui, should be congratulated on keeping contributors to the themes of “history and globalization” but not—as usual with such more or less random assemblages of texts—on getting them all to agree on what the title of the collection means, or what its remit should be, or almost anything else. Caspistegui’s introduction strikes an unpromising note. He refers to macrohistory, world history, global history, and the history of globalization without seeming sure about how or whether to distinguish them, or how to tell macrohistory from metahistory (he refers to Hayden White as if he were an adversary of the former). He falls back on an awkward formulation: “historia mundial/global” (p. 30) while insisting that global history must concern recent or current events (p. 17). Bruce Mazlish wielded the term “New Global History” to mean history of globalization, and at one time the World History Association explicitly excluded it from its remit (I hope the old disclaimer no longer appears on the association’s website). But few practitioners of global history accept limitation to the recent past or to the process of globalization, the Journal of Global History ignores it, and, in any case, globalization is an unhelpfully flabby concept, oozing obesely at edges so contested that it seems unhelpful to invoke it—a canard that needs to be canned, like confit, in its own fat. What some colleagues in the global history movement valorously try to do—to see the history of the world conspectually and seek to identify and understand what has happened all over the planet, or over almost all of it—does not seem to have occurred to Caspistegui or any of his contributors as part of their subject. The editor’s understanding seems excessively selective in other ways. Marxist historiography does not merit a mention. The exponents of Big History and Deep History [End Page 648] (in the sense popularized by Dan Smail and Andrew Shryock) get no mention. Caspistegui proposes “problems and questions around macro-history” as his theme, but they boil down to whether current work on “historia mundial/global” had precedents and whether it is practicable. On the former question, he is again selective to the point of misrepresentation, looking at no possible precedent earlier than Kant and omitting most of the fields in which scholars have tried to take in the whole planet, such as environmental history, art history, history of science, history of manners, history of religion, history of the body, maritime history, history of war, and history of material culture. The second question hardly seems worth asking any longer. We can embrace the globe in our work. Si monumentum requiris . . . Most of the rest of the book is equally disappointing. Alejandro Navas sets himself the task of analyzing the texts of thirty modern authors who have attempted to describe society globally or identify what is global about it, but then apparently forgets to mention any of them again. In a puzzling paper supposedly on “consequences and preludes” (of what is never clear), Frank Ankersmit assures us—I suspect, to widespread demurs—that we are in the grip of anxiety about a recurrence of “una catástrofe como el Holocausto” (p. 69). He asserts that historical writing and “conciencia...

Things That Matter. Zur Geschichte der materiellen Kultur in der Frühneuzeitforschung

Summary Things That Matter. Material Culture in the Study of Early Modern History The paper investigates the significance of things and material culture in the study of early modern history. The first part reconstructs the history of a model of a winch and shows that the object’s meaning stemmed from its materialisation of memories and emotions for its owner, from the representation of technological change, and from the way it functioned for emerging new knowledge of mechanics in the early seventeenth century. Histories of objects, as this section shows, cross-connect diverse research fields and produce narratives that reveal multi-layered realities. The middle part of the paper discusses the theoretical catalysts for the history of material culture, explores the existing fields of research, and inquires about the value of things as historical sources and the related methodological consequences. The last part argues that both the change of material culture and the way early modern men and women used, exch...

Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority.Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950 Series . By John Ott . ( Burlington, VT : Ashgate , 2014 . xvi + 309 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $119.95 .)

Journal Article Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority Get access Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority . Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950 Series. By Ott John . ( Burlington, VT : Ashgate , 2014 . xvi + 309 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $119.95 .) Robert J. Chandler Robert J. Chandler Lafayette, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 46, Issue 1, Spring 2015, Pages 88–89, https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.46.1.0088 Published: 01 February 2015

British models of art collecting and the American response: reflections across the pond. Inge Reist, editor. The histories of material culture and collecting, 1700–1950 series. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. 282 p. ill. ISBN 9781472438065. $109.95 (hardcover).

British models of art collecting and the American response: reflections across the pond. Inge Reist, editor. The histories of material culture and collecting, 1700–1950 series. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. 282 p. ill. ISBN 9781472438065. $109.95 (hardcover). - Volume 40 Issue 4

The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800 Ed. by Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin (review)

Reviewed by: The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800 Ed. by Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin Elizabeth Hutchinson (bio) The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800 Edited by Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012 333 pp. Spices still get most of the credit for inspiring maritime expeditions in the so-called Age of Discovery. But the Metropolitan Museum’s 2013 exhibition Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800 helped the general public see what cultural historians have long understood: the desire for color is what drove Europeans to find new trading partners around the world. Pigments and vibrant products dominated international trade until the synthesis of chemical dyes in the mid-nineteenth century. The Materiality of Color gives life to this history, offering new scholarship on the objects involved in this trade and investigations into the reasons behind different populations’ thirst for color. As the editors explain, Color was precious. … Colored threads and fabric, colored paint for interiors, colored pigments for ceramics, cosmetics, printing, and for artists’ oil paint and watercolors were products that required extensive knowledge and labor and were concocted from material and techniques that not only traveled long distances and across oceans but also were surrounded by mystery and intrigue. (2) In sixteen essays that cover topics spanning the Americas, Europe, and Asia (with some attention to Africans in the New World), the book demonstrates the care with which members of diverse groups produced colorants, [End Page 567] applied them to different materials, and used the resulting objects—clothing, furnishings, makeup, ink, jewelry, home decorations, and so on—to make meaning of their experiences of a changing world. The volume is part of the series The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950, edited by Michael Yonan. It contains forty-eight color plates—a generous number by today’s standards. Two of the editors—Goggin and Tobin—are literature professors who have worked before on several volumes about women and material culture in the long nineteenth century. This book extends more than their time frame—the contributors to this collection hail from a variety of disciplines ranging across the humanities and social sciences including the history of technology and science. The essays thus vary in conceptual framework, some providing close studies of individual objects and others speaking more generally about the technical developments in the production and trade of colored materials. Some authors describe the labor of artisans working with dyestuffs, ranging from schoolgirls to guild members to slaves; others address color from the point of view of the consumer. The essays are substantial but brief enough that the reader is encouraged to digest more than one in a sitting. By grouping the chapters into three parts, “Color’s Social and Cultural Meanings,” “Producing and Exchanging Pigments and Dyes,” and “Making Colored Objects,” the editors have established a structure that allows for the development of key concepts across diverse texts. Readers are encouraged to consider the relationship between color and social prestige, cultural belonging, or the sacred to contemplate how it helped shape national economies and international trade in the early modern period. As the editors point out in their introduction, scholars have recently begun to attend to color, but most studies focus on the modern and contemporary context. While art historians have long paid attention to an iconography of color—linking blue to the Virgin Mary, for example—cultural historians have generally turned their gaze away from pigment. In part because of the limitations of reproductive technologies, earlier studies of the early modern books, textiles, and carvings included in The Materiality of Color frequently neglected the sumptuous hues, textures, and reflective qualities of their subjects, using diagrams or black-and-white illustrations to discuss text, pattern, or subject. An avoidance of color may also stem from a long-standing anxiety about color’s powerful ability to charm [End Page 568] the viewer. Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding’s contribution to the book explores British “chromophobia” as a wary response to the popularity of luxury goods from East Asia. She...

Material Culture and the Study of Hinduism and Buddhism

AbstractThis essay surveys the history of material culture in relation to the study of Buddhism and Hinduism. The essay opens by exploring the factors in Reformation and Enlightenment Europe that led to the marginalization of material culture in relation to religion, and how these attitudes towards the use of material objects in religion entered the academic study of religion as the discipline developed. Colonial attitudes towards Buddhist and Hindu material culture are also addressed as an example of how the western move towards a privileging of texts and doctrines over matter impacted the early study of Indian religions by western academics. The more recent shift towards including data from material sources is also demonstrated with a focus on two fields within religious studies: the history of religions and lived religions. In relation to the history of religions, the essay demonstrates that incorporating material sources both questions accepted scholarship based solely on texts and allows for a more complete historical context through which scholars can explore both texts and objects together. The discussion of lived religions and material culture emphasizes the movement towards understanding religion as embodied and that a study of how objects are produced, exchanged and understood gives us insight into everyday religious practice and the social relationships that are constructed through the use of ‘stuff’.

Artisans, Products and Gifts: Rethinking the History of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe

Artisans, Products and Gifts: Rethinking the History of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe

Introduction: Reframing Australian Design History

Australian design and its history, popularly perceived from both within and without as marginal, are little known beyond Australia. The following virtual special issue of Journal of Design History comprises a compilation of nine articles from the journal focused on Australian design, as well as a consideration of alternative frameworks and approaches for rethinking design history in an Australian context. This introduction begins with a brief overview of developments in Australian and global historiography in order to situate Australian design history within broader historical research, particularly problematizing the issue of national histories. Following this, a review of scholarship on Australian design over the past twenty–five years will help situate the prominent areas of inquiry and methods employed in the articles on Australian design featured in this virtual issue of the Journal of Design History. However, rather than conceive Australian design history as singular and separate, a final section comprising related scholarship—derived from art history, social history, history of technology, labour and manufacturing history, migrant history and histories of material culture—is intended to identify main threads that could constitute what I have termed Australian design history’s ‘expanded field’. Finally, a brief conclusion suggests future possibilities and themes.

Aristocratic material culture in eighteenth-century Naples: the example of the Carafa di Jelsi family

The history of material culture is a field of research in which, nowadays, economic, social and cultural aspects of material life are studied together. An analysis of the inventories included in two civil trials attempts to reconstruct the material culture of two members of the Carafa di Jelsi (a minor branch of an ancient Neapolitan aristocratic family), who died respectively in 1727 and 1763. Some elements stand out: the different lifestyles in their urban or country houses; the signs of their cultural activities; the dual function of their jewellery serving both as an economic asset and for the ostentation of power; the social and symbolic importance of the aristocratic table; the display need for ceremonial dress. On the one hand, these costly elements appear to have stimulated the urban handicrafts economy; on the other, however, they led most of the aristocratic families to fall into debt.

Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds. The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800. The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2012. xix + 334 pp. $119.95. ISBN: 978-1-4094-2915-9.

Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds. The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800. The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2012. xix + 334 pp. $119.95. ISBN: 978-1-4094-2915-9. - Volume 67 Issue 3

Der Schuh im Nationalsozialismus: Eine Produktgeschichte im deutsch-britisch-amerikanischen Vergleich by Anne Sudrow (review)

In this book, her revised dissertation, Anne Sudrow looks at the history of National Socialism and its impact on German society from a new perspective: the history of material culture. She focuses on one artifact, the shoe, as a particularly interesting object in this period, being a consumer as well as a military good. In this work of history of technology, as well as political, economic, and social history, she describes and analyzes the whole product line of the shoe, from raw materials to the consumers, thus the very different perspectives of production and consumption. And in order to better reflect on possible German peculiarities and/or general developments, she then compares the German with the British and the American experience. This ambitious project takes about 800 dense pages of text.

The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800. Edited by Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin. Series: The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950. Surrey: Ashgate, 2012. 390 pp.; 45 color and 16 b/w ills., 2 maps. Cloth $119.95 ISBN 9781409429159

<i>The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800</i>. Edited by Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin. Series: The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950. Surrey: Ashgate, 2012. 390 pp.; 45 color and 16 b/w ills., 2 maps. Cloth $119.95 ISBN 9781409429159

Birds of paradise for the sultan. Early seventeenth-century Dutch-Turkish encounters and the uses of wonder

This article describes and analyzes the first diplomatic gift presented by the States General of the Netherlands to the Ottoman Sultan Ahmet I in 1612/1613. The extensive and very costly assortment of items was presented to the Sultan in gratitude for capitulations, permitting the Dutch access to Ottoman ports and therefore direct access to trade in the Levant and Mediterranean. This paper describes the diplomatic gift, a long-neglected episode in Dutch material cultural history, and looks in particular at the role that wonder and wonders played in structuring this remarkable encounter between the fledgling Dutch Republic and the Ottoman court.

A CULTURA MATERIAL DA CAPOEIRA NO RIO DE JANEIRO NO PRIMEIRO QUARTEL DO SÉCULO XIX: UMA ANÁLISE A PARTIR DA LITOGRAFIA JOGAR CAPOËRA OU DANSE DE LA GUERRE, DE RUGENDAS

The article investigates the history of material culture of capoeira in order to understand the process of teaching / learning the game-fight in Rio de Janeiro in the first quarter of the nineteenth century , indirectly promoting a deeper and greater understanding of its contemporary practice as intangible culture and heritage , and its pedagogical processes throughout history . The research focused on the material culture of capoeira based on the analysis of the lithography Jogar capoera or danse de la guerre , by Rugendas . This work unveils preliminarily and partially the complex relationship of subjects who developed the capoeira ways – immaterial culture – with the objects , materials and environments that formed the material culture of the game-fight , and their respective symbologies .

Book Review: Radio Astronomy in Infancy: Cosmic Noise: A History of Early Radio Astronomy

RADIO ASTRONOMY IN INFANCY Cosmic Noise: A History of Early Radio Astronomy. Woodruff T. Sullivan III (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009). Pp. xxxii + 542. $140. ISBN 978-0-521-76524-4.Decades in the making, Woodruff Sullivan's Cosmic noise is an ambitious historical work, researched, organized, and written with great care. Supported by Sullivan's training and experience as a radio astronomer, his exhaustive reading of the scientific publications of his subjects, and over one hundred oral history interviews conducted between 1971 and 1988, the narrative covers early efforts to detect radio waves from the Sun in the late nineteenth century to the watershed in 1953, the year when, according to Sullivan, radio astronomy emerged as a recognizable research specialty. The story begins with physicists and engineers trying to make sense of a variety of radio signals from the heavens and closes with radio astronomers working in established research groups, developing new instruments, and bridging the gap between radio and optical astronomy. As Sullivan admits, this demarcation means that the book ends just as radio astronomy really took off; indeed, the number of radio astronomers and the scale of their activity after 1953 grows too large for Sullivan's careful micro-historical approach to be tenable.At first glance, the book appears to be in danger of pursuing too many interests. Sullivan claims to have set out to write an internalist history, but he is equally guided by his interest in the history of material culture, the impact of social and institutional forces, and the importance of visual culture (especially efforts of early radio astronomers to convert information into images, as well as illustrations of the equipment used in radio astronomy). In its execution, the book is superb; its careful organization and invention and careful use of a number of well-explained conventions make it possible to read the book in several ways. For example, I was particularly impressed with his practice of relegating brief discussions of tangential points to sections at the ends of chapters labelled 'Tangents. Instead of making the choice either to clutter the main narrative with these points or to excise them, Sullivan is able to share these tidbits without sacrificing overall coherence.Some readers will appreciate the book for its close attention to the dynamics of discipline formation, others for the careful explanation of how a research tradition shifts from little science to big science. The book could be read as a case study in the development of a research specialty or of the relationship between wartime and peacetime 'technoscience'. …

Living in Transition in the Atlantic World: Democratic Revolution and Commercial Society in the Political Writings of Thomas Paine

By reconstructing Thomas Paine's vision of the Atlantic world, this paper will discuss three main points. Firstly, it will be demonstrated that Paine’s political thought articulated an understanding of the historical and theoretical relationship between commercial society and representative democracy. Thiswill highlight the convergences and divergences between the American and French revolutions, and the mechanisms of political and social transition that moved the Atlantic world into the nineteenth century. Secondly, it will be argued that this historical and theoretical relationship between commercial society and representative democracy, found in Paine’s work, claims to reconsider contrasting conceptions of Atlantic history. From its beginnings, Atlantic history has been treated as political history, but new Atlantic studies - such as social and economic histories or histories of material culture - have done much to eclipse the political aspects of the history of the Atlantic world by looking at other, equally interesting factors. By reading Paine, this paper will instead argue that a faithful account of Atlantic history cannot hold on to a strict distinction between the political and social. Instead, the political and the societal are interrelated, both conceptual camera lenses through which the Atlantic world during this era can be more accurately captured.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Cultural History

Cultural history, like its neighbour discipline cultural studies, has never been so popular, in academic circles and perhaps beyond them as well. Since the year 2000 at least nineteen introductions to the subject were published in eight languages. In the last five years, 2007–11, these introductions include three inGerman, two in Italian, one in English, and one each in French and Romanian. The Reformation and the French Revolution have been approached as cultural movements, while the idea of a cultural revolution has been used to describe changes in both ancient Rome and the Russia of Peter the Great. The so-called ‘new cultural history’ in particular is flourishing in its different forms: the history of the everyday, history of the imagined, the history of the body, the history of material culture, the history of cultural practices, etc. Indeed, almost everything seems to be having its cultural history written these days. To quote once again books published since the year 2007, we can now read cultural histories of alcohol, comics, impotence, insomnia, the night, obesity, the sea, shoplifting, tea, terrorism, widows and wine. Two recent multi-volume collections have been published on the cultural history of animals and of the human body. Some of these books have been written by journalists, others by academic historians. Topics that were once considered part of economic or social history have been colonized by cultural historians, as in the case of the history of consumption. The boom has lasted longer than I expected or – since I should declare a personal interest – even dared to hope in the 1980s. Needless to say, this historiographical trend is part of something much larger. Outside departments of history, the empire of cultural studies continues to expand. There has been a turn from literary to cultural

Asa Briggs and the Making of Modern British History

AbstractAsa Briggs was one of the most influential historians in the post‐war world. He not only put the history of 19th century Britain on the map and fostered Victorian Studies but he became a key figure in the development of social history. Briggs has been an innovator, launching urban history, local history, labour history, media history and the history of material culture. Both in his career as an historian and as a university manager, he has encouraged interdisciplinarity and cross‐fertilisation between academic disciplines. This article discusses his many works but also the wider significance of his career as an academic statesman.

Transnational artifacts: Grappling with fluid material origins and identities in archaeological interpretations of culture change

There has been a gradual shift in historical archaeology towards interpretive approaches to material culture, including recognition of the potential for multiple functions and meanings in local contexts. It is argued here that artifacts can also maintain multiple, fluid origins and identities that affect our understanding of the nature of cultural persistence and change among migrant, indigenous and other ethnic groups. However, predefined classification schemes are often rigid and do not allow for this kind of fluidity, including the potential for artifacts from one culture to be indigenized into another. Data drawn from recent research on Japanese migrants in British Columbia, in conjunction with an approach rooted in transnationalism and diaspora, are used to highlight the nature of these ambiguities and to suggest methodological and theoretical means of overcoming them. These solutions include the need to develop contextual classification schemes that incorporate multiple artifact identities and to conduct detailed material culture histories that trace shifting origins and identities both before and during periods of migration or displacement.

Cultura Material e Cultura Literária na Idade Média Ibérica: Fragmentos da Identidade Sefaradí entre Pérsia, Palestina e Hispania

On the interface of the fields of material culture history and medieval literature, we propose to analyze the levels of Jewish interaction between East and West, as evidenced in the universes of practices, behaviors and organizations of the Iberian aljamas, the Jewish neighborhoods from the 5th to the 8th century. These exchanges were present in the daily lives of Iberian Jewish people even during the mandatory conversions to Christianity in the 7th century, and the consolidation of the Caliphate of Al-Andalus, in the 8th century.