I finished the first week of my internship with the American Philosophical Society Center for Digitial History as the Levitt Fellow. I’m working on their Revolutionary City project. The section on “lived experience” is the one I’m most interested in, and I hope that I can find some interesting information there. I spent my first …
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I’ve read this book before for my class on Managing Public History, but rereading this book after what I’ve learned and experienced in the American Material Culture class gave me a further appreciation for the story. I don’t want to deconstruct the objects inside the sac in this blog, as I would be rehashing or …
My research object in the American Material Culture class at Temple University has been Magic: The Gathering cards. Magic, as it often is short-handed, is a game that my brother introduced me to over 10 years ago now, and I’ve been fortunate to have so many incredible memories with friends from our time playing or …
Material culture and objects tell a story that can be difficult to read but is essential nonetheless. The study in ‘’Do Objects Lie: A New Video for Teaching about Material Evidence’’ puts forward that objects can lie and be misleading, but by studying them we can find out the truth behind them. They do this …
This week’s readings were a rollercoaster of emotions. At first, I thought of how I wanted to be buried, to audibly gasping at almost every page of the last reading. The thing I was most fascinated by in David Sloane’s ‘’The Nature of History of the American Cemetery’’ was the newer burial practice of ‘’woodland …
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Public restrooms are something I don’t spend much time thinking about, and that’s mostly because I’m not out of my house or place of work very often. This week’s readings examine how public restrooms and other facilities and spaces are designed and how they have an ongoing history of discrimination. The article by Grace Schultz, …
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The objects we own are expressions of ourselves and our world. They’re extensions of our interests, passions, hobbies, etc. Sitting at my desk I’m reminded that I’ve consciously made the decision to surround myself with things that bring me joy. My desk is bare of decoration besides a golden boar I bought when at Bulguksa …
This week one of our readings was, ‘’Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’’ by Clifford Geertz. He borrows ‘’thick description’’ from Gilbert Ryle, and believes the same as Max Weber that man is an animal who is suspended in webs of significance. He interprets culture to be those webs. Even though this reading …
This week’s readings helped me develop my understanding of material culture and the gendered history of artifacts. The Prown article, ‘’Mind in Matter’’ asks why material culture? Material culture furthers our collective understanding of the past through objects and creates further representation for historical actors then through other forms of analyzing the past such as …
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In this blog post, I will be briefly exploring four readings from my American Material Culture class. I currently work at an auction house that deals with maps, fine art, and historic furniture. So I will sometimes be drawing on that experience in my writing, and I also have plans to connect the readings to …