Matthew Headley on Public History

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 two days with APS learning how to digitize historic documents using a flatbed scanner (I believe the model is Epson, but I can’t recall the exact specs of it) and a bound volume scanner. The book we scanned was from John Leacock, who as I read more from his book and his play, “The Fall of the British Tyranny”  he produced I find to be an interesting person. In his book, I found interesting recipes on how to make a bologna sausage, his grapes, and winemaking, general advice about gardening, and what to do when you have tooth pain. This is what excites me most about working with historical documents. I want to know how people lived or do my best to try to infer from the information I have. My first week was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the weeks to come! This is a huge project APS is undertaking, and I’m happy to be a part of it. I hope that the work we are doing highlights marginalized voices often overlooked in archives, and also brings in the community of Philadelphia. 

I’ve been rereading Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy to come up with three points to discuss. 

• Community engagement: From my first week, I don’t see how the community of Philadelphia is currently involved in building the archive, it seems to be all from partnering organizations. I can ask about this and see if they expect any level of community engagement in adding to their sources, or in offering their thoughts. I know this project continues to be workshopped and presented at conferences and meetings, but I’d love to hear what the community of Philadelphia wants this project to be. How does this project serve the community of Philadelphia? I remember hearing someone mention at lunch that they hope as this project releases (as it goes live, but the site will be changing and I don’t know if it’s been marketed outside of conferences yet) that the community would make suggestions, or become involved.
  
  2) Race and gender representation: Does the archive illuminate voices from marginalized communities in our communities and in the archives? I’m hoping to find out this and something they mentioned in my meeting with them to be something they’re trying to do. How does the archive depict the everyday life of historical actors, and how does this apply to our everyday life? (Framing Philadelphia as the “Revolutionary City” makes sense historically and contemporarily. Philadelphia continues to be a city in which social movements are happening. I wish we could see some parallels, but I doubt that would happen, which is a crucial point in Digital Community Engagement). I hope that as the project progresses there will be sections like this.
  
  3) Accessibility: Using digital tools to make these objects available to the public. How does this work, and what is it achieving? Everyday Life in Middletown: The Archive as Community allows people to submit items to the archive, will this project let this or illicit this from the community, or will it only be from other organizations? Ultimately, as someone who doesn’t study Early American history, why does this matter? (Not to be a pessimist, but I know why this project matters). What can this project say? What can the people of Philadelphia expect and feel from this project? 

I believe that APS can rise to the challenge and answer these questions and find these stories. I know the project is still growing and developing, so I hope that they bring in the community to make this project something unique. I’m happy they’re making this all available online, and working hard to develop an online space to showcase all this information. I worked 14 hours my first week.

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 doing a disservice to how Tiya Miles tells it. This story interestingly moves through time and keeps the reader interested in knowing more about this sac. 

One of the questions that come to mind about this is how objects can evoke emotions. This sac was passed through three generations of black women, each woman embuing it with a story. Especially Ruth who would go on to embroider the sac with its history. The emotion that emanates throughout this is love. A mother assembles a sac for her daughter before they are separated, and packs it with useful and meaningful objects, a dress, some pecans, and a braid of hair. Rose packed these for her daughter and the love she felt for her daughter Ashley is something I carried with me the whole time while reading. Love can be found throughout the text, as well as physically on the sack that Ruth embroidered.  

Ruth embroidered the bag with the story of the family and pictures a few pages into the book. After working on making my own sampler I started to appreciate this act more. Needlework is more time-consuming than I ever imagined, and Ruth took the initiative to record how Rose gave this bag to her Daughter, Ashley, and how now Ruth the granddaughter of Rose has the bag. This bag is interesting as it establishes its history on the object itself, of course, more can be explored about it such as where the material came from and so on, but the bag itself becomes an archive of the family’s story. Even though it has so few words to it, by studying it and tracing its story Tiya Miles explores the lives of women whose lives typically aren’t archived, collected, or stored. Tiya Miles reads against the archive materials as she works to trace Rose and find out more about her. 

Tiya Miles includes pictures throughout the text such as an embroidered map and other embroideries. The way she shows objects and discusses them is captivating. I was unfamiliar with hair being used in art but seeing the works in the section Ashley’s Seeds was beautiful and each included a small description. Inclusions such as this make the book that much better for me. At no part in this text does the story feel like it’s dragging, I felt compelled to read more. The sack as an object and its construction continued throughout the story, so anyone interested in material culture would enjoy this. At the end of the book Tiya Miles discusses how there’s been a resurgence in traditional arts and crafts.

Ruth recorded her family and turned and Tiya Miles explains how she turned an object into a document through her needlework. Ruth recorded the oral history of her family and worked hard to preserve and protect this sack that has been with her family for generations. In doing so, she created an archive using a family object. Tiya Miles said that she hasn’t found any other objects like this in her search. Black women have been excluded from archives, as both Tiya Miles wrote about and Marisa Fuentes in Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. If you haven’t read this book yet, you are doing yourself a disservice. I actually had to get this back from my friend a few weeks ago in preparation for class.

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 being around the game. A comprehensive research profile of Magic cards as material culture is a difficult undertaking, mainly because the game has been putting out around 4 sets a year at a minimum for the last 30 years. As someone who once had a job working with Magic cards and a long-time player, I’ve noticed that the cards don’t always feel the same. 

A new promotional product started to be sold in 2019 called ‘’Secret Lairs’’. They are special reprinting of cards with alternative art, usually based on a theme such as ‘’Pride Across the Multiverse’’. Issues have arisen from foil secret lairs. Foiled cards are the same as normal cards, but they have an additional layer of material that makes the card look shiny or holographic. The problem that foil Secret Lairs cards have consistently had is that they become warped and bent, which is pictured below. The cards are curled and thusly can not be played in any tournaments because they can be considered ‘’marked’’ or easily found cards in a deck that could be used for cheating. This issue isn’t just with the foil Secret Lairs, as foils in general in the last 3-4 years are mostly unplayable because of the curling of the cards that are being distributed. I haven’t been able to find anything about this through my research, or how the materials may have changed. I’ve tried calling the company that produces almost all of the Magic: the Gathering cards, Cartamundi but haven’t heard back yet after multiple messages. 

One of the directions I could see this research going in the future would be an oral history, or documentary-style production. There are large Magic events all throughout America nearly every month and I believe an oral history of the communities relationship with Magic as a hobby, as a material that is consumed, and as a history of the game would excite people. Large Magic events and conventions bring in a large group of people with a shared hobby, as well as employees from Wizards of the Coast which is the company that makes the game. One of the groups that have been absent in my research has been Wizards of the Coast. I haven’t spoken to anyone there directly, and that’s something I’ll have to follow up on. I believe the community would be interested in this kind of information and could see this project becoming something digital either on a website, or youtube videos with oral histories. 

When I was interviewing Matt Weiss, someone who has played the game for around 20 years and has worked as a judge at events and helped run stores, something important stuck out to me. Magic: The Gathering is a card game that allows people to express themselves. With so many printings of the same card with different art, languages, foil or non-foil, and other ways to collect and play the game does create a sense of individualism. Magic is a trading and collectible card game, but it also does a good job of making it so people have options and freedom of expression. The community that Magic has fostered cares about the game, and a lot of the information I’ve been getting about the game has been from forums that are created by players who record information such as how cards are printed, and on what material.

One of the leads I’ve been trying to follow but haven’t been able to figure out is who Wizards of the Coast does printing through for every set that comes out. From what I’ve found so far, there are typically 3-4 main sets printed and distributed every 3 months and these seem to be coming from Cartamundi. Though promotional products are sold throughout the year at different points and I believe these are printed on different card stock, and perhaps from a different company or location. Some of the promotional products, such as the popular ‘’Duel Decks’’ cards have a glossy, almost waxy feel to them. I haven’t been able to find information on this, but this is something that the community is well aware of. There have also been conversations on forums and websites dating back mostly from 2017 to the present about Japanese card stock, and that cards produced in Japan are preferred by players because they have fewer issues with foil curling. This was something Matt Weiss mentioned in our oral history as well. I’ve been doing research into this and it does appear that Japan does use a different card stock, which Wizards of the Coast released an article about on September 19, 2016, but that post has been removed from their website. The forums I’ve been using do a great job of citing their sources, so I’ve been able to try to follow their links. The only issue is some of these links no longer direct to anything. 

One of the things I considered doing with this project was posting about my research interest in these forums and in various Magic communities. I knew I would get a lot of responses, but I knew I wouldn’t have enough time to follow up on all of them, so I decided not to do it. If I were to continue research on this project, I would want it to be for the Magic community and with the community’s help. Magic as a card game, collectible, and hobby goes beyond the community it’s created. This research could pertain to collecting any object, such as the first printings of books or playing cards in general. I’m very excited about this project and wish I had more time for it. One of the things that inspired me is the ‘’Enter the Battlefield’’ documentary that started in 2016. They were a series of documentaries on professional Magic: The Gathering players, pro teams, community members, and locations. I loved these and still watch them even though they stopped making them. If I were to continue the project it would focus less on material culture and more on the community and the relationship that the game and the players have shared. Matt Weiss asked me to present at a Magic convention which would be on how the game has evolved over the years and how we as players and the community have changed. Unfortunately, we weren’t selected to present.  

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 in multiple ways, but one of these that I found interesting was the removal of the inclusion of the Native American in the Death of General Wolfe painting. The jug that is made later removed the Native American man, which they mention is part of the erasure of Native Americans and larger history.

Immigrants and migrant workers are the backbone of America and continue to be left out of reaping any fair reward for their labor. The article ‘’Why Migrant Workers Feed Their Husbands Tamales: Foodways as a Basis for a Revisionist View of Tejano Family Life’’ by Brett Williams discusses the gendered labor and the economics of food consumption in the Tejano community in Illinois. Food production is gendered labor done by women, even though migrant families rely on all members of the home working. The ritual of celebrating with Tamales at the end of the harvest which they don’t reap the rewards in comparison to the acknowledgment of the difficulty faces when all they have left in regards to food is tortillas the author makes showcases the difficulties these families face.

  The sisters Sara Bose and Winnifried Eaton who used the pseudonym Onoto Watanna published a cookbook in 1914. The article ‘’Food for Fantasy: Sara Bose and Onoto Watanna’s 1914 Chinese-Japanese Cook Book’’ by M.E. Guth reflects on the cookbook these two sisters created, and how they brought East Asian culinary practices into the home of middle-class families in America. The author says the fantasy these women created was allowing people to live in a world outside of their own. Included in this are the commodification of East Asian objects and food, but also the prejudice and stereotypes associated with the East Asian migrants in America. The two sisters helped in redefining Chinese and Japanese culture to Americans as something beyond chopsticks and chop suey. 

Disposable chopsticks helped popularize and drive the use of chopsticks by people outside the chopstick cultural sphere, which is what Q. Edward Wang argued in his book Chopsticks: A Culinary History. He covers other topics such as how chopsticks differ in countries and why, as well as eating practices. Communal eating from shared dishes and the hygiene is something he discusses and this plays into the types of chopsticks in Japan, China, and Korea. Japan uses disposable chopsticks more than the other two countries, which has religious aspects tied to it from Shintoism as well as sustainability as they have access to a lot of trees. Koreans use metal chopsticks which are easier to clean and hardier. Where in China they typically use wooden chopsticks that are reusable with lacquer on them. He starts this chapter by saying that the word for chopsticks is the same as bridge in Japan.  Chicken was a staple of my diet when I was young. My family didn’t have a lot of money, and chicken was cheap compared to other meats. I never knew of the association between poultry profitability and African Americans and their role in the commercial economy of poultry until reading Building Houses out of Chicken Legs. The market in which slaves would buy and sell food or other objects allowed for some partial freedom to participate in the ‘’capitalist charade’’ was allowed by white slave owners and reinforced the idea that slaves wouldn’t have freedom. The chicken and these markets became an avenue of change and agency though. The author argues this and that small victories in everyday life for black people can help reverse the stories of social power. 

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 burials’’ or ‘’natural burials’’. I love learning about burial costumes, rites, cemeteries, or anything relating to death or dying. Being buried in mostly unmarked graves is honestly appealing. I don’t need anything fancy, I’m dead. That being said, I’d prefer to be cremated so no one in the future could unearth my bones. As well as that, I hate the consumerist aspects of businesses capitalizing on grief to charge as much as they can to grieving families. 

 As someone who grew up in New Jersey, my first experience with business parks was going to my hockey rink as a kid which was located in one. The poor public transit system and the reliance on cars for travel in America are something that deeply saddens me. These business parks contribute to that problem. ‘’Campus, Estate, and Park: Lawn Culture Comes to the Corporation’’ by Louise Mozingo helped me better understand urban sprawl, or as I learned in high school-  urban sprawl was a good thing and had nothing to do with race or class in any way. Companies moved out of cities, cities in which the Fortune in 1967 said, ‘’ New York is becoming an increasingly Negro and Puerto Rican city’’. (Page 261). 

Gendering in the office and workforce overall still exists, and continues to be a problem. Angel Kwolek-Folland’s article ‘’The Gendered Environment of the Corporate Workplace 1880-1930’’ analysis insurance offices during this time period and the idea of an ‘’office family’’. Which of course, falls under the fatherhood of the executives, reinforcing a male-dominated space through language. Women were made to eat in separate spaces from their male coworkers. Women’s bathrooms were also more inaccessible than males, as they were sometimes on different floors or just generally further away than the men’s bathrooms. The thing that stuck out to me most was the dynamics in the executive offices. They shared these offices with female secretaries, who were often referred to as ‘’ office wives’’ or ‘’office housekeepers’’. How incredibly demeaning and controlling! This exact language is still used. I’ve heard my dad’s friends referring to coworkers as their office wives. Both language and the material culture of offices separated and treated women as others. I don’t even know how to begin talking about Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now by Naa Oyo A. Kwate. I decided to choose only one restaurant to discuss and that’s Richard’s Restaurant and Slave Market. Open in 1952 by couple Joseph and Helen Wilkos, they marketed themselves as an upscale place that included a room with aristocratic trappings and food such as $3.25 ‘’lobster tail with drawn butter’’. They also host events and did marketing for weddings to be held there. Richie’s was open until 1980, and the family’s 3 restaurants were bombed with dynamite. Nothing to do with the racist themes, but because of testimony given before the Senate on rackets. The popularity and acceptance of such a place in a sundown town that drew political figures and celebrities to the location are appalling. The atmosphere of ‘’Authentic African’’ which was animal heads and guns on the wall which feels more American than any other country to me, offered dishes that had nothing to do with Africa such as Alaskan crabs. It’s clear they were capitalizing on and perpetuating racist ideas. One of the four rooms they had included waitresses in slave girl costumes. There aren’t records as to what that means exactly. Everyone should read this book. Which coincidently is free online.    

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, ‘’The NAACP Equalization Strategy and the Dismantling of Segregation in Virginia Public Schools’’ highlights the very difference of bathrooms and facilities based on race during segregation in America. The photos included in this text show how girls bathroom at the Botetourt high school in 1948 looks more akin to a bathroom we are used to seeing today with what appears to be at least 5 individual stalls. Whereas the boys bathroom at Gloucester Training School the same year was a wooden outhouse. Beyond that, their drinking fountains differed as two flanked the girls bathroom that accents the door, while the one for the boys at Gloucester was outside from a metal pipe. Schultz ends their article by discussing how segregation is not just in the past, and how school systems continue to be segregated. A 2019 report from EdBuild stated, ‘’more than half of the nation’s schoolchildren are in racially concentrated districts, where over 75 percent of the students are either white or nonwhite’’.   

The segregation of public facilities continues in Harvey Molotch’s chapter, ‘’Bare Life: Restroom Anxiety and the Urge for Control’’. The author discusses how the lack of public restrooms creates a health issue as people are forced to do their business in alleyways or wherever they may be able to find some level of privacy. Gender plays a role in this practice, as the author mentions that men can use the bathroom outside during the day in India, but women must do so at night or in a secluded area. Bathrooms are also typically arranged around a rigid binary, that there is a men’s room and a women’s room. Bathrooms and institutions set up this way alienate transgender people and intersexed people. The author suggests a simple solution that I couldn’t agree more with. Build more restrooms in both poor and rich parts of the world. The article includes blueprints for restrooms and photos of restrooms. 

Dr. Simon’s chapter four draft, ‘’Infrastructure’’ starts off with defining infrastructure, a buzzword used by politicians and other people that has so many elements inside it. They continue by telling the story of the building of Union Station and the attention paid to creating the bathrooms to be both functional and attractive. This is a great juxtaposition to what we move to next, which is a journalist named Griffin going in disguise to New Orleans for six weeks to see what life was like as a person of color there. He had to map out locations for bathrooms in his head and found himself in alleyways relieving himself due to the lack of public bathrooms, especially for people of color. Ignoring the problematic fact that Griffin pretended to be a person of color for 6 weeks for a lived experience that he later wrote about, he concluded what most likely every person of color in America has- it’s difficult to exist in a country that continuously isolates and alienates you. Griffin asked someone during his ‘’experiment’’ where the closest church and closest bathroom are. The person responded, ‘’You are going to end up praying for a place to piss’’ (Page 9). The chapter concludes with Washington Square Park and how the bathrooms lack seats. They are dirty and no one is taking care of them. They didn’t even have walls for privacy, and the park manager has no concern about changing that. 

I grew up in the middle of nowhere in New Jersey. A real one-horse town (there were lots of horses, but only one traffic light). I knew someone who was homeless for a short period of time, they were living out of their car and we both worked together. Thankfully after a few months, their situation improved. When I moved to Philadelphia I was surprised by seeing as many homeless people as I did in my everyday life, I always just assumed the city had a location that provided shelter and a place for people to live that needed it. I was a pretty naïve kid, and it took me a while to grow up. As I’ve walked the streets of the city more, I’ve come to learn that the city creates structures to prevent the homeless from having any semblance of comfort, and pushes them out of locations. During my time at Eastern State Penitentiary, one of my coworkers was bringing food pretty consistently to what I believe they referred to as the homeless encampment in the area, which was later broken up by the city. Robert Rosenberger’s book, Callous Objects: Designs Against the Homeless is a short read that I recommend everyone read. In reading this book, I found myself mostly thinking of examples of what the author was discussing that I’ve heard in the news. Such as some unhoused people being removed from streets when they were considered to be occupying too much space to obstruct walking areas, or when the articles about unhoused people using electricity from the grid in LA.

The readings this week point out an alarming issues in our country. Our public facilities are out of date, dirty, and uncared for. Beyond that, they divide gender into a binary and continue to reinforce a segregated legacy in this country. I’m going to be more conscious while walking to look for architecture that is designed to hurt homeless people such as benches with gaps in them so people can’t lie down, as well as how often I see public restrooms. 

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 Temple. (It is very cool). Posters from movies I like all around, well actually just one movie, but lots of posters. Behind me are two bookshelves with books I’ve read over my years of school, as well as books that I read in my free time. All of this is a long way of saying I’ve never thought about Barbie, and what can be learned from examining her role in American material culture. 

Throughout the four readings this week, the two main thoughts I had in my mind were commodification and the cultural gendering of objects. Instead of Barbie’s growing up, I had action figures. (Well, I still do). Pearson and Mullins in their article, ‘’Domesticating Barbie: An Archaeology of Barbie Material Culture and Domesticating Ideology’’ was published in 1999, and tells of how Barbie went from being a figure of feminine power and sexuality to the as the article title would suggest a more domesticated role. Barbie has become a vehicle of ideology and promotes the idea that girls should be nurturing, domesticated, and without agency. The article goes through the phases of Barbie and how she has shifted in such ways as reinforcing evangelical right wing during the Reagan years. 

To continue the conversation of gendered objects, ‘’Selling Mr. Coffee: Design, Gender, and the Branding of a Kitchen Appliance’’ by Rebecca K. Shrum analysis the shift from percolated coffee to electronic machines for coffee. The article goes over making coffee in both forms, and how percolated coffee was typically done by women in homes. The article includes extensive visuals and pricing of objects and compares how they are marketed and who is using them.

Peter Stallybrass’ article, ‘’Marx’s Coat’’ is an interesting examination of how Marx viewed objects and also gets into societal gender roles. To Marx, the coat is emblematic of a commodity and not seen for its value of providing warmth, or as it is said in the article, ‘’for the commodity becomes a commodity not as a thing but as an exchange value’’. (Page 183). The article goes into great detail about Marx’s views on objects and fetishization, but what I was most interested in was the gendered labor of pawning the coat. This was typically something done by his wife, unless in great distress then Marx himself would go and pawn the coat. 

The conversation on commodities and exchange systems is continued in Igor Kopytoff’s, ‘’The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’’. He proposes that we conduct a biography of things in the same way we do of people. He also explores what makes something a commodity, ‘’A commodity is a thing that has value and that can be exchanged in a discrete transaction for a counterpart, the very fact of exchange indicating that the counterpart has, in the immediate context, an equivalent value’’. (Page 68).

These all help me better understand my object, Magic: The Gathering cards. They can be bought and traded. Each card has a price that is attached to how desirable it is. They are a luxury commodity, that is used in a multitude of ways. Such as collecting, playing, trading, investments, art, and so on. Without the community around it, they wouldn’t have the value they have.  

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 is short, it is dense and difficult to grapple with. My interpretation and application of this to material culture would be that through ‘’thick description’’ we can offer cultural context and meaning to an artifact. The final paragraph suggests that we shouldn’t be trying to answer the deepest question, but instead provide answers to those outside of the community. I am unable to answer everything about my object, but I can provide enough information that can help others to better understand my object and the web of culture around it.b   

Magic: The Gathering is a card game that first hit the market in 1993. The game is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and the city of Philadelphia will be hosting a massive convention and the Pro Tour in two weeks. I’ll be in attendance and hope to share photos from the event. Magic as a game has changed my life. My brother has always been my best friend, but the game brought us even closer and I’ve always looked up to him as a person, and as a player. I also have made so many friends in the community and it has also shaped my outlook on the world and life. This is the reason I choose to examine Magic: The Gathering cards as my object for material culture. 

The cards in the game have changed over the years in appearance. I’ll be focusing on the new framing and creation of cards. Magic: The Gathering cards are 2.5 x 3.5 inches with a weight of 1.814 grams. Oversized cards are printed as promotional products, but I don’t have any of these to measure. Magic cards are made of two layers of cardboard joined together by an opaque blue adhesive with a core between the two layers (mtg.fandom). The card stock gives the card bounce and flexibility. In fact, one of the ways to check if a Magic card is fake or re-backed (the process of putting the face of a card onto a newer back of a card to appear newer) is to bend the card. If the card snaps or the art rips, the card is a forgery. If the card bends back to shape, it’s real! You can also use a jeweler’s diamond to look at the rosettes inside the core. Magic cards are printed on a card stock called Corona, which is sourced from three factories. These are Arjowiggins in France, Kohler in Germany, and USPC in the USA (mtg.fandom). There was an article published by Wizards of the Coast, the company that produces the game, entitled ‘’Improvements in Upcoming Cardstock’’ on June 5, 2019. Unfortunately, the article has been removed from the website, and the link doesn’t work anymore.   

In 1992, Richard Garfield and Peter Adkinson approached Cartamundi, a game manufacturer, and started their partnership. Magic cards have been printed with Cartamundi for 30 years. Engineers from Turnhout, Belgium, created a custom printing machine to accommodate the job. Cartamundi is an international company with six locations in America, One in Japan, One in Mumbai, One in Singapore, and Sixteen locations in Europe. I’ve reached out to Cartmundi with questions on pricing and I’m currently waiting to hear back.

Wizards of the Coast, the owners of Magic: the Gathering has recently made a change to the languages the game is printed in. The core eight languages they are focusing on for products are English, Japanese, Chinese (simplified), French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. The languages that were discontinued starting September 9th of 2022 are Russian, Korean, and Chinese (traditional). 

A noticeable difference in modern Magic: the Gathering cards is the way the edges look. Laser cutting helps speed up the process of printing and creates a more unified edge look. Specialists from TCGPlayer noticed the changes in the edges of cards printed around September 2021 and forward. I’ll include a picture and a link to the article that demonstrates the differences in edges from laser cuts.    

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 reading journals. This does so by looking at objects’ creation and consumption and can even be traced to locations or time periods through the style that is used. 

The gendered history of textile production is something I never put thought into, and this class and readings are opening my eyes to it. The production of materials such as samplers, clothes, quilts, and even maps through needlework shows both a gendered history and a labor history. There exists a hierarchy of art and that is something that Rozsika Parker challenges in their work, ‘’The Creation of Femininity, From the Subversive Stich Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine’’. This hierarchy can be seen in how embroidery is viewed against painted works. A quote that really stuck out to me from Parker when referring to crafts is, ‘’both a source of pleasurable creativity and [an] oppression’’. (Parker 491)

The topics explored in the work by Leora Auslander in, ‘’Deploying Material Culture to Write the History of Gender and Sexuality’’ are fascinating. One of these is that gendered labor reinforces gendered construction, such as gender norms. As well as this, clothing can be linked to sexual identity and sexual expression. The process of a girl becoming a woman was also through developing skills in spinning, weaving, and embroidery. 

Even objects that are unfinished and provide no evidence s to who started the work that now remains arrested in its current state still tell a story. Ulrich’s chapter, ‘’An Unfinished Stocking’’ follows many stories of women in history and their labors. Through both letters, their creations, and their experiments we can better understand these women and the colonial period. The experiments with sericulture for silk and how silk was valued offer another avenue of studying the labor of women in history.  

The schools that girls and young women attended are another thing we can study. Cecilia Goold Lewis created a map of the United States in 1809 and it included areas belonging to Indigenous Americans. The school she attended, Pleasant Valley Boarding School taught grammar, writing, arithmetic, needlework, geography, and working maps. The subjects being taught are important in understanding what was perceived as important for women of that time and class to study.  As well as this, we can see from the ad how much it costs to attend this boarding school.  

I’m enjoying the project of creating a sampler, with Temple being the school we all belong to. I had no idea how time-consuming the process is, and the effects it has on your body. Sometimes I feel my eyes going a bit cross when trying to thread my needle or the aching in my shoulders and neck area as I work. I work on it for at least 20 minutes a day, and sometimes longer. My hope is to have the border finished in 2-3 weeks and have my plan drawn or at least conceptualized. I’m currently thinking of doing a house with two hills on each side, with the alphabet above it, and my quote below the house. I’m realizing how slow I really am at this. I’m considering starting a journal and recording whenever I work on it and making sure I keep myself regimented.     

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 my research projects that I am currently working on. 

Jules David Brown’s ‘’Styles as Evidence’’ challenges historians to examine objects and not dismiss them. Brown says ‘’Historians are less at ease when they are called to consider evidence from the past, the mute heritage of things produced over the centuries by the minds and hands of men’’. (Pp. 198). Without fully understanding what to look for, I felt this discomfort myself. A chair was simply a chair to me. After spending more time around these objects, I can recognize Chippendale pieces, or styles being used. I’ve had the benefit of spending time with Dr. Philip Zimmerman, who has walked me through the steps that Fleming puts forward in his work.

E. McClung Fleming in ‘’A Propose Model’’ presents a model to study artifacts. The four basic steps include identification, evaluation, cultural analysis, and interpretation. Having a clear work to compare another two is a great way of identifying the styles of the period and if a piece fits. There have been many times when Dr. Zimmerman would say to me something along the lines of, ‘’That’s from Pennsylvania’’ and I would be confused and he would tell me about how it has the same style, and construction patterns as Philadelphia pieces as the time period. His words continued to fill my head while reading these articles. 

Alison Barlett and Margeret Henderson’s article ‘’What is a Feminist Object’’ was both an incredible read, and something that is helpful for me for a project I’m working on. They use material culture to understand women’s movements. Objects of activism become objects of feminism. Presenting these objects in a museum could, as Sharon Macdonald says, cause a ‘’memory unsettlement’’. (Pg. 6). As these objects, along with objects from minority groups in general, challenge dominant memories presented in museum spaces. They proposed a system of feminist objects to order their collection as corporal things, world-making things, knowledge, communicative things, and protest things. My current research project is focused on the modern Korean feminist movement, from 2016 to today. In 2016 a woman was murdered at Gangnam Station, a clear case of femicide. Protestors left post-it notes and chrysanthemums at the site. These objects are objects of protest, hope, and a way to mourn. 

Charles Montgomery’s ‘’The Connoisseurship of Artifacts’’ was an interesting read into the work being done by craftsmen. It’s an easy read that goes over multiple ideas such as style, function, trade practices, and so on. The part that stood out to me was when he discussed how antiques are repaired or altered from their original form. As someone who looks at historic furniture often, I’ve started learning how to identify when a piece is replaced or newer than it should be. Whether this is from a clear difference in wood and the grain, or the overall materials being used. Or to the aging of the material and the use patterns. This is a great read for anyone studying material culture.

The overall style of Magic: The Gathering cards is hard to limit because of the use of various artists throughout the years. Each has their own style and influence that they bring to their work. For example, one of my favorite artists Winona Nelson was inspired by her Indigenous roots when creating the art for Voice of Resurgence. Our how artist RK Post uses lines in interesting ways in his art, and it radically stands out that the designs are his compared to other Magic artists. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting multiple artists and hearing about the process they go through. The company that owns the game, Wizards of the Coast, will reach out to artists with vague ideas or words and ask the artist to create something. This process can go back and forth until the process is finished. Artist Ryan Yee told me this when I saw him in Pittsburgh and he told me the story of how Eidolon of Rhetoric came to be.

I think tracking Magic cards through their production and consumption may be easier then interpreting styles of the art. The card stock that Magic cards have been printed on since the start of the game 30 years ago come from three factories in the world, Arjowiggins in France, Kohler in Germany, and USPC in the US. I hope through my studies to potentially find differences in printing in any of these areas, or perhaps they all are fully the same. Through a quick search, the cardstock material is listed as 350 gsm silk paper.

I’ll be using ideas form Charles Montgomery’s article, specifically I’m interested in the trade practices, function, and history of the object. The function is relatively clear, but perhaps this could be analyzed further as Magic cards have other use and context outside of just playing the game with them. People alter their art, or create boxes with them, make clothing, and other various things that people who love the game do. I’m looking forward to exploring the game that I love. I’ll attach the photos of the cards I referenced at the end, as well as the card I’ll focus on for my study, Anafenza, Kin Tree Spirit. The art is done by Ryan Yee, a Pittsburgh native who I had the pleasure meeting some years ago. It’s one of my favorite cards, and has some sentimental value to me. I also own a frames print of the art, and have bought other art from the very talented Ryan Yee. my plan for this research will be to look further into how Magic: the Gathering cards are produced, what they are produced on, how do those factories come about those materials, the printing process, and the distribution of the product globally. I’ll have to follow supply chains and find out what factories ship to what countries, and perhaps even what factories print certain languages, as this is a global game. I also want to analyze how Magic: The gathering is consumed as a product, and how it both is shaped by and shapes the culture around itself.

My Attempts at Hand Stitching:

       Here is my first attempts at doing a cross stitch. After some practice, I was starting to get a handle on making a straight line. Though admittedly it took me a couple of hours to figure this out, which I’m not proud to say. Overall the experience of stitching is really fun! I’m someone who enjoys keeping their hands occupied, so it was a nice thing to work on while enjoying some time in front of the tv. I look forward to sharing weekly updates on my stitching progress.