Research Guides: HIST/ANTH 264: Materiality and Spectacle in 19th C. U.S. (HC) Fall 2017: Material Culture

Material Culture -- Supplemental Readings

Glassie, Henry, “Material Culture,” in Material Culture, (Bloomington : Indiana University Press), 1999.

Lubar, Steven and Kingery, W. David, History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, (Washington : Smithsonian Institution Press), 1993.

Miller, Daniel, Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Oxford : Blakwell Publishing), 1987.

Schlereth, Thomas J. Cultural History & Material Culture: Everyday Life, Landscapes, Museums, (Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press), 1992. Parts I and II.

Petroski, Henry, The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts From Forks to Pins to Paperclips to Zippers Came to Be as They Are, (New York : Random House), 1994.

Collections, Links, Images & Background

HEARTH: Home Economics Archive:Research, Tradition, History
Cornell University has digitized over 1600 books and journals published between 1850 and 1925. The Subject link takes you to descriptions of the topics covered along with links to brief introductory essays and bibliographies.
Oral Tradition and Material Culture: Multiplying Meanings of “Words” and "Things"
In this brief article from Anthropology Today, Julie Cruikshank considers ways in which material objects can be presented in museums to convey their cultural context, active use, and symbolism.
Oxford Handbook of Material Culture
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Presents 28 overview essays on major aspects of material culture including consumption, agency, collecting, and analyzing as history.
Sears Roebuck Catalogs, 1896-1993
The catalogs present illustrations of merchandise along with often detailed descriptions emphasizing how new, technically advanced, and rich in appearance the goods are.
Smithsonian Collections Online. Trade Literature and the Merchandizing of Industry.
Presents catalogs, pamphlets, advertising materials, and ephemera from the National Museum of American History. Subjects covered concern essential industries that emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This provides important information for research involving fairs, trade cards, and related topics.
Trade Card Place
This website is aimed at all people interested in Victorian trade cards It includes scholarly resources as well as practical needs for collectors including information on auctions and images of many trade cards organized by product categories.

TriArte: The Art & Artifacts Database of the TriColleges This link opens in a new window
TriArte features art and artifacts from Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges.

Major Image Collections for U.S. History

American Memory This link opens in a new window
Provides information on, and access to, digitized versions of primary-source collections on American history and culture, including photographs, documents, sound recordings, and motion pictures.
JSTOR Images (formerly Artstor)
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A digital library that provides access to thousands of digital images derived from a variety of museum, library and archival collections. Images support a variety of disciplines including architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) This link opens in a new window
The DPLA allows you to search millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Each record links to the original object on the library or other content provider's website.

Flickr: The Commons
Images from many of the world's public photo archives, described by Flickr users so that some are very richly described.
Smithsonian Collections Search
Search over 8.59 million catalog records of museum objects, and library & archives materials. More than 963,000 of these records contain online images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other online resources.