Material Culture Minute: Map Memories

Browsing the aisles of a favorite antique mall in Lewes, DE, a few weeks ago, I came across a 1958 "how-to-get-there" street guide for New York City.

I was going to leave it. It fits in the palm of your hand, but it's kind of thick and bulky. Tyler and I have a large binder of ephemera we've accumulated over the past few years for teaching purposes. Do we really need an outdated map? 

Of course we do! We're historians. New York is my favorite city. And I can't tell you how often I've gotten important social-historical details from historic city directories. Students, I think, could get a lot out of this. Who was the audience, and how can you tell? Why was Roosevelt Island known as Welfare Island? What can you deduce about the 1958 world political scene based on the list of consulates?

Not only that, but it occurred to me that I was looking at my dad's New York. Born there in 1939, he was 19 when this "how to get there" map was published by the Barkan System. I thought it might be fun to take a look at it with him and see what he recognized and talk about what's changed. 

Sure enough, my dad was full of stories, memories drawn out by looking through the directory of places of worship, schools, and hotels and spending some time with the large street and transportation map. 

Perhaps my favorite memory revolved around television. We were browsing the list of local TV stations (just seven) when Tyler asked my dad about when his family got a TV. 

My dad came back with a story about the time he was at his parents' house (by this time, my dad's family had moved from the Lower East Side in Manhattan to Queens) and some of his friends--one in the FBI and another in the Secret Service--stopped by to watch a game on the family's new color TV.

OK, so this photo was not of my father's TV, but it's one of my favorite snapshots in my collection and is roughly contemporaneous with when my dad's family got a color TV. I love the whimsical figurines perched on top.

While munching on snacks and enjoying some drinks, my dad's mom walked into the room, opened the top drawer of a bureau to fetch some tablecloths, and started--"oh, my!"--at the government-issued firearms my dad's buddies stored there for safekeeping while cheering on their favorite team.

I'm not sure who won or what sport they were watching. But who cares? For $4, I got some great anecdotes and another treasure to add to our bursting binder of ephemera fun. 

Property of Nicole Belolan: Ephemeral Material Culture of One Day in 2014

Some time in 1935, Virginia Brussard (possibly the Altha "Ginny" Virginia Compher mentioned here)

bought a blank scrapbook.

She assembled, affixed, and labeled paper and other ephemera from what appears to have been her last year of high school in northern Maryland. She saved everything from candy wrappers and cigarettes...

...to dance cards and bows.

In 2013, I bought Virginia's scrapbook at one if my favorite paper shows: the Paper Americana Show in Elkton, MD.

I have nothing that compares to Virginia's scrapbook. At various times during my life, I did make a few scrapbooks of my own. I discarded most of them in one of many fits of unburdening myself of unnecessary stuff. Just think how many more scrapbooks we might have today if people like me had never, as some people put it, decluttered. Or, consider how many fewer scrapbooks we will have from our times since so many people are "going paperless." Yes, the paper scrapbooking industry--while still strong--is in decline, as some are reporting.

Like many scrapbooks, Virginia's includes lots of stuff we would consider ephemeral. In other words, when most people finished eating their Planters Peanuts in 1935, they discarded the wrapper.

Let's face it. There aren't many of us out there saving our receipts, food containers, or our bookmarks, either casually or methodically (like Virginia). As Tyler and I walked around the Paper Americana Show this past January, we mused about how much longer we'd have piles of early twentieth-century snapshots to wade through at paper shows. Today, many stores email receipts, and most of us squirrel away our photographs in "the cloud." Someone better be saving this stuff so future collectors have something to buy at the Paper show that isn't on an external hard drive, we decided. I started to wonder what a day's worth of my discardable paper might mean to a paper show patron in 2064.

So in the space of about twenty-four hours, I did not throw away (or recycle) my paper and other ephemeral waste--a sort of experimental archaeology exercise that gave me a chance to think about my habits as they related to the stuff we casually toss away today.

At the end of the day, I piled up everything from candy cigarette boxes to Colonial Williamsburg Foundation membership offers...

 

...from interlibrary loan slips to credit card junk mail.

I learned more about myself and the world and then I thought I would. One of the things I noticed was my near automatic impulse to throw away my parking garage receipt and other pieces of the day immediately upon removing the coat in which I had temporarily stashed them for the short ride home. I also noticed that when it came to "junk mail," I didn't even bother opening most of it. I also didn't bother to expunge my name from the various marketing mailing lists on which my name appears. (So I will be receiving these things in perpetuity.) The only reason I opened the Colonial Williamsburg offer is because I wanted to photograph (for the blog) the Foundation membership card I knew they included inside the mailing based on nearly identical promotional material I had already received. (Don't get me wrong - I do love Colonial Williamsburg). I also decided (and this isn't all that revolutionary) that we just generate more paper than seems to be necessary. The book I interlibrary loaned (using an electronic form) generated at least one and half pieces of full-sized paper. When will this "paperwork" be completely digital (let alone--gasp--the book itself)? And once I sat down to a meal, it occurred to me that my little experiment excluded food packaging (save the candy container) and toiletry packaging entirely. But I can tell you that I use shampoo, split end repair and four facial cleansers and creams on a regular basis...all of which I purchase along with disposable containers. I considered my body routine to be relatively low-maintenance until I started tabulating the damages. Finally, after I snipped a piece of red ribbon from the bouquet Tyler got me, I thought about all the stuff around me (health records, miscellaneous school papers, birthday cards...) that will, within a matter of a few months or perhaps a few years, be discarded. Do I live among trash?

I will live among more soon. I cooked up the scheme that I will save my paper ephemera one day every year until I no longer have any junk mail or ILL slips to save. I hope my students will appreciate the opportunity to think about change over time as it applies to my paper.*

When I sell my "ephemeral Property of Nicole Belolan" collection or show it to my students, some will giggle at how quaint those physical credit cards were back in the old days. They may even pause for a moment in disbelief as they try to figure out if the eighteenth-century looking newsprint, which you can buy readily at Colonial Williamsburg, is really from "early" America. (I won't speculate here when will we be teaching "later" America or twenty-first century America. Perhaps we already are.)

Just like I will continue to wonder why Virginia saved cigarettes boys (suitors?) gave her, perhaps in 2064 someone will puzzle over why the same person who interlibrary loaned historical monographs about early American disease also consumed candy cigarettes. 

* Interestingly, I converted to Apple's iCal about two years ago and just this January went back to my paper system. Somehow I feel more in control of my time when I mark it with paper.

Further Reading

I've been meaning to write this post for a while now, but I was newly inspired to put fingertips to keyboard by my dissertation adviser's current grad seminar about disposability (sadly, I am no longer in coursework!) and this TeachArchives.org exercise titled "Digging for Garbage in the Archive."

For more on the history of hobbies and do-it-yourself culture, see “Introduction: Context and Theory,” in Steven M. Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (1999): 1-20. I don't necessarily agree with the suggestion that hobbies are a postindustrial phenomenon, but this is a landmark book, nevertheless. 

If you want to read more about scrapbooking and the history of similar paper crafts, see Beverly Gordon, The Meaning of the Saturated World and “The Paper Doll House,” in The Saturated World: Aesthetic Meaning, Intimate Objects, Women’s Lives, 1890-1940 (2006): 1-35 and 37-61, Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler, Eds., The Scrapbook in American Life (1997), and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, “Introduction (1): Mrs. Delaney from Source to Subject,” Mark Laird, “Introduction (2): Mrs. Delaney & Encompassing the Circle: the Essays Introduced,” and Amanda Vickery, “The Theory and Practice of Female Accomplishment,” in Mrs. Delaney and Her Circle, edited by Mark Laird & Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (2009): 1-39; 94-109.

And finally, if you want to read more about ephemeral material culture, check out Maurice Rickards and Michael Twyman, Encyclopedia of Ephemera (2000), William Davis King, Collections of Nothing (2009), Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (2000), and Joseph Heathcott, "Reading the Accidental Archive: Architecture, Ephemera, and Landscape as Evidence of an Urban Public Culture," Winterthur Portfolio 41, 3 (Winter 2007): 239-268.

Stitch by Stitch

Under Tyler's tutelage, I have been sewing a hunting shirt for myself. Hunting shirts, as former Colonial Williamsburg journeyman tailor Neal Hurst has written in his thesis and as several bloggers such as Tyler and Kitty Calash have explained recently, were worn on the early American "frontier" and were adopted as a uniform by Revolutionary War soldiers.

A detail of the right pleated sleeve on my hunting shirt

I'm not going to bore you with too many details of my hunting shirt sewing experience (though I have been tweeting about it periodically if you'd like to follow my musings), but I will tell you that every time Tyler gives me a new command--back stitch to the end! fell your seam! that's a half back stitch, not a regular back stitch!--I wish I had my own reference sheet of stitches I had made myself. Well, historically, I am not alone.

For hundreds of years, women and schoolgirls (but not this girl) have been compiling their own bound collections of reference and bragging rights stitches into books. Labored over in a variety of settings from elite private homes to working-class home economic classrooms, these sewing sample books typically include a series of plain-sewing sample stitches and other standard sewing practices such as patching. Some include miniature completed examples of clothing, an exercise meant to train young sewer's before executing the full-sized piece. Check out this 1850s beauty completed by Ellen Mahon, currently in the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood, which features not only plain sewing but also decorative embroidery and needlework. It's hard to argue with the pronouncement that these gems are at once charming and informative, giving us tantalizing glimpses into how stitchers learned about making stuff.

Here's an early twentieth-century example of a sewing book a school girl made in a Reading, Pennsylvania, sewing class, which Tyler kindly brought home for me after a recent solo antiquing adventure.

Cover of Miss Ethyl G. Yanster's sewing sample book, 1912 (Nicole Belolan's Collection)

As you can gather from the cover, the book belonged to Ethyl G. Yanster. Ethyl was born around 1901 in Pennsylvania to Louis and Annie. In 1925, Ethyl married Dr. Irwin Samuel Lape, a physician. By 1930, the family had moved from Reading to Lebanon, PA. They had two children, Sally and Samuel. Irwin died in 1965 after a short stay at the Lebanon Sanitarium. Ethyl died in January of 1975 and was buried at a cemetery in Newmanstown, Pennsylvania, about a 40-minute drive from where she grew-up in Reading.

What can we learn from the book about the nature of education for girls in early twentieth-century America? How might have this sewing book served Ethyl in her childhood? And why the heck aren't your kids coming home with these today?

First, sewing was part of a curriculum that, according to the list on this sample book, coverered some of the usual suspects, with boys meeting separately from girls: English, "General," History, Civil Government, and Physics. Based on the "general directions" Ethyl pasted at the front, we know that, at least in Ethyl's case (if we assume school is where she learned to sew first), she learned how to sew among her peers (and not alone). It was meant to be completed systematically, but it's hard to say whether Ethyl followed the "system" to the T. The progression of work roughly follows what printed contemporaneous guides such as Anne Loden Jessup's The sewing book: containing complete instructions in sewing and simple garment-making for children in the primary and grammar grades (1913) prescribed.

Excerpt of "General Directions" for completing the sewing sample book, 1912 (Nicole Belolan's Collection)

An array of colorful woolens, cottons, and silks, worked with a variety of stitches executed by hand, all labeled neatly by Ethyl, were pasted into the notebook after the instructions. Not only did this show that Ethyl "mastered" a given stitch, but now she could reference these samples whenever she needed to recall a particular sewing method.

Basting and back stitches on wool, Ethyl's G. Yanster's sewing sample book, 1912 (Nicole Belolan's collection) 

The work is far from perfect, but it's better than anything I could have done at the age of eleven. It includes enough stitches and mending techniques to keep anyone busy making and mending a very adequate wardrobe--and that of their family. Indeed, Jessup noted in her introduction that "the most important factor" of teaching children in public school is "training [them] for the efficiency in the family and in home life." She went on to explain that "Lessons in domestic economy will enable the pupils in later life to solve the question of wise and judicious expenditure." And so the question this raises for me is, when did parents stop (assuming they ever) taught their children these skills and the philosophies behind them?

"Sewing gather on a band" and "Sewing embroidery with facing band," Ethyl G. Yanster's sewing sample book, 1912 (Nicole Belolan's Collection)

Sewing may have faded out of the school curriculum (or a "home" curriculum, for that matter) for any number of reasons (though I did have to make a gym bag when I was in junior high), but I would suspect one of the primary reasons was the fact that so much ready-made clothing became more and more accessible for the ordinary individual. Why learn to sew if you can get your outfits from a local store and think nothing of donating your worn clothing to the local Salvation Army or Goodwill?

(Despite the rise of ready-made clothing (or "industrialized" anything, really), we need look only as far as Etsy to gauge the ever-increasing popularity of the textile-related DIY movement and the related polarity of purchasing "handmade" stuff for everyday use.)

I'll probably never know if Ethyl kept up with her sewing, but I'll try to keep this manifestation of her early effort at the skill safe and sound. Maybe I'll even use it as finish my hunting shirt and start new projects.

The Winterthur Library has several examples of these sewing books in its collection. When I visit for research over the next few weeks, I'll take a few photos and share them with you. I'll scan Ethyl's book in its entirety and post it when I get a chance.

Material Culture Minute: Bookmarking Rob and His Alter Egos

Over a year ago, while digging through one of my favorite booths in one of my favorite antique malls in Newark, Delaware, I spied some ephemera peeking through plastic behind a framed item on the wall. It didn't budge when I gently tugged, but I wasn't about to leave this stone unturned.

What could it be?

I yanked the plastic sleeve out from behind the frame and was delighted to meet "Rob, N.Y." via small snapshots attached to a hand-fashioned leather bookmark complete with fringe at the bottom. In one photo Rob labeled "DUDE," he donned a top hat and looked beguilingly into the distance; in another he labeled "ANGLE" (or did you mean "Angel," Rob? It's OK; I had a hard time with that letter combo too),  Rob wore a pointed paper cap and folded his hands as if in prayer. In the last photo, which he labeled "Rob" in "cursive," he offered his ordinary Rob pose. About $16 dollars later (a little pricey, I agree), the bookmark was mine to treasure as did its previous owner(s).

What motivated Rob to send this hand-wrought treasure? If he was anything like me, Rob simply enjoyed keeping in touch with friends and family via the post in a way that made it difficult for the person on the other end to forget about the sender. Rob's bookmark reminds me of contemporary greeting cards that aren't really about the recipient ("You are the best father!") but rather the sender ("I am your more talented child!"). (I am guilty of selecting such cards regularly.) Turns out Rob from N.Y. sent this homemade leather bookmark in the 1880s to a Mary [C.] Fletcher at 113 S. Vermont Avenue, Atlantic City, New Jersey. Mary, I discovered using Ancestry Library Edition, had been married to a Samuel Fletcher. I was unable to unearth much more information about the couple, but I bet that Mary was as delighted as I was to be on the receiving end of Rob's playful greeting.

From Nicole, D.E.

A Feast for the Eyes: Paper and Photographic Ephemera Roundup

As I glanced through the mail a few Saturdays ago after taking in the antiques show in Elkton with Tyler, I squealed with glee when I noticed a letter from the Singerly Fire Company. This could mean only one thing: I won the paper show door prize. Again.

We had joked with friends about my chances of winning the door prize for a second time, but I had never expected that it might actually happen. I don't plan on sharing the booty, but I will take a few moments to share some recent paper and photographic acquisitions with you.

First, there's the item I bought at the January paper show: a 1930s scrapbook a teenager in high school put together. I tweeted a teaser photo a few weeks ago, and I hope to blog about it soon when I have more time to take a closer look at it. (For starters, she liked to save cigarettes.)

I can't emphasize enough how much I enjoy collecting paper ephemera and photographs. For one, these objects are accessible to most people (including kids--start 'em young!) in terms of cost. Saturday, for example, I bought several photos for just $2/each at the Elkton Antique Show (same location as the paper show). Second, this stuff is portable and is great to collect for teaching purposes. When I want to bring a real mid-ninteenth-century religious tract into class to show students what tract society peddlers carted around to promote developing a more personal relationship with God, I can. I have two stored safely in acid-free plastic sleeves.

What else have I acquired recently? For starters, I am a sucker for unusual or hard-to-find photographs of interiors or exteriors that document everyday and ordinary domestic life. We know how the elites lived. Their stuff is published,  collected, and interpreted with verve. We know less about how ordinary folk lived. Take, for instance my friend Mr. Grier Youngman here (he name is on the underside). At first glance, I registered a regular guy reading, sitting in a common Victorian balloon-back chair. As I looked a few seconds more, I noticed all the "props" in this photo that give us some hints into his everyday life. He rode a bike, which is peaking out from behind the chair and the packed rotating bookshelf. On the wall, you see two decorative pieces of art and what is most likely the bottom of an American flag. 

What's his story? Perhaps this gentleman boarded in a room alone, and perhaps he made a living in a profession that required a small library. Or he was a voracious reader. In either scenario, he probably featured his books (and his reading) prominently in this photograph because he saw his books as part of his identity. After doing some genealogical digging in Ancestry Library Edition, I discovered that Grier was from Danville, PA, and that he was born around 1871. He married in 1894, and I would suspect that he had this photo taken when he was still a bachelor bank cashier (or teller). The way Grier staged this photograph suggests that he had some professional ambitions as a young man. And so it is not surprising that, by the time 1930 rolled around, according to the census, Grier had become the President of the Danville National Bank. Grier had built what we might consider a solidly "middle class" lifestyle by the Depression. Did this photograph represent Grier's aspirations to attain that status? What made the interior we see here a "home" for him?

Exterior visions of domestic life can be equally thought-provoking. 

In this photo, we see (cut?) flowers sitting on a shelf at right, as well as some hanging flowers descending from the roofline. Presumably, early twentieth-century ordinary folk used plants and flowers for decorative purposes around their homes, but we rarely see that practice documented in photographs (let alone in manuscript evidence). And by chance, it looks like I might have found a photograph featuring an older man with a cast of his left hand (related to my interests in disability history). What do you think?

Also with the body in mind, take a look at this photo.

We don't think much of women drawing attention to their pregnancies in photographs today. Indeed, celebrities often pose nude when pregnant for magazine covers. Did you ever stop to think when it became customary to draw attention to one's pregnancy while posing for a photograph (or any portrait, for that matter)? It looks like that might be what is going on in this early twentieth-century image.

I am unaware of a tradition of "pregnancy" portraiture in early American visual culture. That said, I do know that a number of Elizabethan era portraits picturing women in the late stages of pregnancy survive. Scholars such as Karen Hearn and Pauline Croft have suggested that those 
portraits, an example of which you can see below, may have embodied, among other things, concerns over political machinations, producing successors to various hereditary titles, and the health dangers associated with bearing children as women aged.

Portrait of a woman, probably Catherine Carey, Lady Knollys, oil on panel, 1562 (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection). Published in Pauline Croft and Karen Hearn, "'Only matrimony maketh children to certain...' Two Elizabethan pregnancy portraits," The British Art Journal 3, 3 (Autumn 2002): 20.

What does the relative unpopularity of such portraiture in earl(ier) America suggest about our attitudes toward women and child-bearing, privacy, and corporal modesty? 

And finally, we have some jokesters.

I bought this online for Tyler for Christmas, thinking it was a whimsical tintype (as the dealer said it was).

I was somewhat skeptical since the men's hairstyles looked to be from the 1920s, but I knew that tintypes were (believe it or not) in use through the 1930s.

Sure enough, when I opened the package, I knew the minute I looked at the photograph in person that it was not, in fact, a tintype but a paper photograph that  looks a lot like a tintype when developed. I am not annoyed that I didn't receive a tintype. Rather, I am annoyed I have yet to figure out exactly how this photograph was produced. I think it may be an example of a photograph produced by a an early photobooth or photomaton that was used to capture images of people at fairs and carnivals. In the cop and robber photo, for instance, the fact that there appears to be a crowd in the background suggests that this was taken outdoors at a place (such as a fair or carnival) where there would have been a lot of people. If anyone out there is familiar with such images from the early twentieth century, I'd be interested to learn more about them. What can this practice reveal about how the conventions of humor and visual trickery have changed over time?

Once I had familiarized myself with "fair" photos, I didn't hesitate for an instant to snatch up this contemporaneous photo of a man posing behind a "fat suit" cutout.

French fries, anyone?


Further Reading

Historians, sociologists, and economists alike have struggled to enlightened us all with fascinating discussions in an effort to define the "middle class." If you're interested in joining the conversation, you might start with Burton J. Bledstein and and Robert J. Johnston, eds.,  The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class (2001) and Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (1989). For a discussion of Victorian home interiors and middle class culture, nothing beats Katherine C. Grier's Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making in America, 1850-1930 (1989) and Culture & Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-class Identity, 1850-1930 (1997). Also see Kenneth L. Ames, Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture (1992).

On the history of Mr. Youngman's bicycle, see David V. Herlihy, The Bicycle (2004).

For more on Elizabethan pregnancy portraits, see Pauline Croft and Karen Hearn, "'Only matrimony maketh children to certain...' Two Elizabethan pregnancy portraits," The British Art Journal 3, 3 (Autumn 2002): 19-24.

Humor, visual trickery, and photographic manipulation boast long histories. You might be interested in the Met's recent exhibition on the history of photographic manipulation. On of the exhibition's sub themes was "novelties and amusements." In addition, Tromp l'oeil ("to fool the eye") visual culture in American isn't quite analogous to what we're seeing in the fair and carnival snapshots above, but I think it's related. If you're interested in reading more about visual trickery and the tradition of tromp l'oeil (to fool the eye) painting in America, see Wendy Bellion's Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011), exhibition highlights from the National Gallery of Art's exhibition Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Tromp L'oeil Painting, and the online catalogue for the Brandywine River Museum's exhibition on contemporary tromp l'oeil artists here.

Material Culture Minute: A Postcard Between Friends

"A postcard!," I exclaimed a few birthdays ago as I opened a gift from my best friend.

The view "From Market St., Bridge, looking South, York, Pa.," was fun to look at but didn't mean much until I turned it over.

There, on the underside, one friend wrote to another "Friend" (which is what my best friend and I call each other) in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania (where my parents live now and where I lived since I was a senior in high school), some time in 1911.

What a coincidence!

In what appears to be awkward adolescent script, B.S.N.S. wrote to Miss Naomi Shoop:

Dear Friend-

You must excuse me for waiting so long to answer your card that you sent me. I was very glad to hear from you we are all well hoping these few lines will find you all the same. Well I guess you are counting the days by this time for you vacation. Jay told me that she can hardly wait till you come home. [illegible]...B.S.N.S.

Before I started writing this post, I conducted a search using Ancestry Library edition (a provenance researcher's best friend!), expecting to find a Naomi Shoop in Bloomsburg (I did not). But once I transcribed the postcard message, I realized that Naomi is probably from the York area. Why else might she appreciate a postcard view from the Market St. Bridge, looking south, in York? (I suppose I am also assuming the sender is from that region.) There were a few Naomi Shoops living in that region around 1910, so it is difficult to say who the original recipient of this postcard was.

Needless to say, she had a good Friend.

Further Reading

For quick primers on the history of postcards, see this resource at the Smithsonian and this one from the Metropolitan Postcard Club of New York City. Chris Otto at Papergreat writes about postcards often. Check out his blog for unusual postcard specimens. Also, The Ephemera Society of America, the leading organization of ephemera enthusiasts, includes resources associated with postcards on its website. For any ephemera research, start with Maurice Rickards' Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian.

Aside from the popular "collector's" literature, not much has been written on postcards. If you're interested in more scholarly perspectives of postcards, you may want to take a look at Bernadette A. Lear's "Wishing They Were There: Old Postcards and Library History," Libraries & the Cultural Record 43, 1 (2008): 77-101. In this essay, Lear writes about her own collection of postcards that depict libraries and how we might use those postcards to learn more about the history of libraries. It includes a good overview of the history of postcard consumption at the beginning. Winterthur Portfolio published a fascinating article on an early twentieth-century cache of paper ephemera and other artifacts one professor of urban studies found in his home in St. Louis recently. Joseph Heathcott, "Reading the Accidental Archive: Architecture, Ephemera, and Landscape as Evidence of an Urban Public Culture," Winterthur Portfolio, 41, 4 (Winter 2007): 239-268. Heathcott does not focus exclusively on postcards, but they comprise part of the collection he interpreted in his article about class, upward mobility, and modernity. Finally, postcards also served more macabre ends in history. For example, sending postcards depicting lynchings of African Americans was popular during the early twentieth century. To learn more about this phenomenon, see the digital collection Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America.

I'd love to hear about other postcard resources from my readers!

Material Culture Minute: Checking Between the Pages

I like boxes. I like the anticipation that mounts before opening them up to see what's inside. Dust and bugs? Remnants of snuff? Deeds and wills? Empty space?

I play the same game with books. For instance, what seemed like an ordinary mid nineteenth-century Bible with fading gilt edges and a worn leather cover in Tyler's collection...

The Holy Bible (Philadelphia: Miller & Burlock, c.1856), 4.5 in H x 3.25 in W x 2 in D.
...turned out to contain thoughtfully preserved scraps of fabric and printed ephemera.


Martha Jane Baird's inscription--rendered carefully yet awkwardly--on the Bible's flyleaf indicates that Martha purchased this Bible for 75 cents in 1856.


But who was Martha? The first several passes through this treasured book turned up a scrap of newspaper I tried to use in identifying the Martha Baird who owned this Bible. According to a wedding announcement jammed among three pieces of fabric, James W. Beckford of Cumberland, Ohio, and Sarah E. Ruby of Claysville, Ohio, wed in 1894. I thought that perhaps Martha, then, would be easy to find among Martha Bairds who lived nearby. Not so.

Until I went through the pages for perhaps the tenth time this afternoon and came across another narrow strip of newsprint that read, "...[t]ravel and Adventure."

And on the reverse,"Leeper-Baird-Dec. 21, 1882, by Rev. I.N. White, Mr. Joseph Leeper of North Salem, and Miss Martha J. Baird, of Washington, Guernsey co., O."

Yet what I thought would be the key to Martha's identity proved to be unhelpful in identifying definitively (in the federal census) the Martha who owned this Bible.

Despite this, the Bible provides a glimpse into Martha's world. We encounter scraps of textiles:

romantic verses: "You are the fair whom I love best/Consent to wed and make me blest." and "Nay, blush not, fair one, when I own/My life, my bliss, depend on thee alone."

a used 3 cent stamp (circa 1851):


and, as noted above, wedding announcements.

Martha used this book from childhood through (at least) her marriage as a convenient and safe repository for tokens that surely meant something to her. I'm glad I took a moment to check between the pages.

Material Culture Minute: Picking on Martha's Vineyard

Last weekend, my parents and I ventured to Martha's Vineyard. MV is certainly worth a visit. Between its multicolored nineteenth-century religious revival meeting cottages and its spectacular coastline, any visitor would find something to do there.

On the final day of our trip, I requested that we stop in the antique shop down the road from our B&B. My hopes sank as I walked through the mostly unremarkable (and over-priced) assemblage of vintage and modern wares...

...until I found a corner of paper objects. Knowing my dad (who tends to stay out of such establishments) was waiting patiently in the car for my mom and me to return, I quickly started browsing the unorganized layers.

Among the postcards, maps, photographs, and advertisements, at the bottom of one pile, a brightly-colored hand-painted scene caught my eye:


I pulled it out and flipped it over, delighted to see nineteenth-century writing on the reverse:


I turned the mechanical toy over again to test the one of two mechanical pieces still in operating order:





Who could resist a moving draw planer at a mere $10? Now if only I could restore the cello player to his former glory.

Material Culture Minute: The Best Things in Life are (Almost) Free

A few weeks ago, just before the spring semester began, Tyler and I ventured to the Paper Americana Show in Elkton, Maryland. Paper and ephemera shows attract an interesting group of people. Paper and ephemera collectors are definitely different from collectors who gravitate toward furniture, ceramics, etc. Many ephemera booths categorize their stock into themes. For instance, someone who specializes in trade cards and trade catalogues often creates categories such as "food and drink;" "health and medicine;" "animals"; "sports"; specific states such as "Delaware"; "foreign," etc. Why? Because paper and ephemera collectors tend to collect items that fall into only a handful of themes. I didn't quite get this until after I attended a few of these shows and found myself looking through only a handful of themes (health and medicine, needlework, etc.). This makes sense, as paper and ephemera shows feature way more stock than a regular antiques show does. You couldn't go through it all if you wanted to. The problem arises when you run into a collector interested in all things "Delaware" who takes over not only the "Delaware" box of postcards, menus, car dealership advertisements, etc., but also a three feet perimeter around the Delaware box. That means that Connecticut and Florida collectors will have to wait for an untold number of minutes to see if they can find any treasures in their respective boxes. Not all paper and ephemera collectors are this territorial, but there are enough out there to make browsing difficult. Beware.

At any rate, Tyler and I didn't find anything extraordinary, but we picked up a few interesting photos and other pieces of ephemera for a few dollars here and a few dollars there.

For example, here is a great late nineteenth-century tintype featuring some ladies wearing identical plaid or checked skirts.



And here, we have a snapshot of a woman in a well-stocked general store.



And who can't resist shoes? Below is a 1866 receipt for a pair of shoes. The cordwainer in question worked in his trade through the nineteenth century in Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, in York County, and he also served in the Civil War.



Here, we have a late nineteenth-century trade catalogue for paper collars. Tyler and I were hoping that the brand name was the same as the one of the paper collar box I purchased in Michigan in January, but, alas, we misremembered the name. Either way, the catalogue can be used in conversation with the contemporaneous box.



And finally, I got all this at a steep discount. About a week ago, I found an envelope in my mailbox from the Singerley Fire Company in Elkton, MD. I immediately thought of the paper show and the door prize drawing I entered, but I also wondered if I was being tapped to donate to a firehouse 20 miles away.

Sure enough, the envelop contained a lovely note congratulating me on winning ($25, which covered about 80% of the total cost of my purchases) and letting me know that they hoped that I had had a lovely time!