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 Do we really need an outdated map?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. 

Material Culture Minute: Museum Fabrics to Wear

Last year, I mentioned an article from the 1970s that profiled a woman named Jenny Bell Whyte who made modern clothing out of historic coverlets. She established Museum Fabrics to Wear in 1971, and you can learn more about her philosophy and her craft in the article I have since tracked down thanks to an acquaintance. You can download the article from Americana by clicking here. According to her New York Times obituary, Whyte started making clothing from museum-type artifacts upon purchasing textiles the Brooklyn Museum had deaccessioned and sold at auction in 1975.

Many museum pros would blanch at the practice of making clothing from historic artifacts. But you have to admit, the skirts are fun and probably made from better-quality materials than you can find at most shops today.

I'll let you decide whether to keep your coverlets on your bed or your body!

Fashion shot from Jenny Bell Whyte's "Skirts From Coverlets," Americana (September/October 1978)

Material Culture Minute: Kittens

While plowing through a new stock of photos at one of our favorite antique malls, Tyler and I came across this stunning tintype portrait of a girl and her kitten.

Tintype of girl and kitten, late nineteenth century (Nicole Belolan's Collection)

The girl looks self-assured and protective of her little charge. What better way to gain some responsibility as a child--not to mention companionship--than to care for another life? Having just recently cared for a starving mother cat and her four kittens, we immediately connected with this image.

Our "Momma Cat" and her little ones are healthy and happy now. They are living at homes of friends and friends of friends (we were't permitted to keep them where we live). And we hope their new owners are as smitten with them as we were--just as this girl seems to have been too.

"Momma Cat" (later known as Desire and now a third name!) and me

Further Reading

For more blogging about the material culture of pet keeping, check out Katherine C. Grier's blog here. She also wrote a book on the subject: Pets in America: A History (2006). Lots of the material for that book (and now the blog) are part of her own collection. 

Material Culture Minute: "Are you a doctor?" Or, the Continuing Saga of Collecting Disability History

Combing the aisles of an antique mall in Chadd's Ford, PA, a few weeks ago, I was looking for something special. A friend, who was out and about on a pre-Labor Day 'tique hunt, had just emailed about a mid-late nineteenth-century wheelchair he stumbled across at this mall.

I have plenty of tintypes of people with disabilities, but I am lacking a wheelchair, I thought, and it looked like this one was (to borrow Sandra Lee's phrase) "semi-homemade."

With some extra money burning a hole in my pocket and few encumbrances on that sunny August afternoon, Tyler and I schlepped into Pennsylvania to find the artifact in question.

It didn't take long. We looked it over carefully and were pleased with it overall, but I wasn't happy with the sticker price. Reluctant to ask for a reduction, I nearly walked out and drove home. But thanks to Tyler's encouragement, I found it in myself to demand not the customary 10% discount by rather a whopping 20% discount.

What did I have to loose but a really awesome wheelchair?

To my shock (and the shock of the woman manning the counter), the dealer took my offer. The counter lady walked me back to the chair, slammed her hands on the crest rail, paused, looked at me, and asked in a thick, vaguely New Jersey accent, "What are you going to do with this?"

"Put it inside my office," I declared.

"Are you a doctor?" she asked. 

"No. I'm a historian," I said.

"Well, maybe it belonged to FDR," she offered.

"Hm," I muttered, rather ravenous and therefore in no shape to dole out a history lesson.

Instead, I took it home... 

...and tried it out.

Since we have limited space for large pieces of furniture and infinite space for tintypes and crutches, the next big purchase might only be justified if it's a good hundred years older than this puppy. But even then, I'd have a hard time deaccessioning this fascinating piece of the past from my collection. 

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I never thought I'd be one of those people who collects what they study. But there's no going back now, and I wouldn't undo what I've done for the world.

Further Reading

Want to learn more about why I collect the material culture of disability history? Check out my blog post at the Disability and Industrial Society Blog.

Looking for more? On the web, see the Smithsonian's excellent online exhibition EveryBody: An Artifact History of Disability in America.

Finally, if you want to check out a physical book (I can't blame you), see Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics, edited by Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Steven Mihm. 

Material Culture Minute: "We Go from One Thing to Another"

There is often a fine line between what antique dealers sell and what they collect. In some cases, dealers display their personal collections inside their shops. And why not? They give patrons something else to look at, and the collection doesn't (as far as we know) take up valuable space inside the dealer's home.

Tyler and I recently encountered an impressive dealer collection at an antique store in Maryland. As we walked around the shop, we admired the hundreds of items the dealer had in his collection. We didn't need to ask about the collection ourselves to learn more about it, though. A regular beat us to it. In response, a store clerk explained:

Store clerk: "Well, Alfred's been buying oyster cans. You can see he's got them lined up there along the ceiling. He's really into them right now. We go from one thing to another."

Many of the oyster tins on display inside this antique shop looked like this beauty. On the reverse, the can assures customers that its contents are safe for consumption. Oyster packagers added such labels when the federal government enhanced its food safety laws around 1900. Legislators crafted many of these laws in response to a variety of food-related dangers that developed as the food processing industry expanded with little oversight and consumers were less and less likely to buy their food from the source (or a local middle man). In the case of oysters, deadly cases of typhoid fever (caused by salmonella) had been linked to the mollusk.
Oyster tin, Pride of the Chesapeake brand, 1920s, 7.25" x 6.56," 2007.0054.01 (Smithsonian)

Regular store patron: "Oh, I like them oyster crocks. Even seen them oyster crocks?"

Store clerk: "Oh, yeah, they're pretty nice. We just bought one the other day for $2,500."

Sure, that's a lot of of money. But many food containers (or advertising items, including stoneware crocks) weren't meant to or expected to last long. So I'm not surprised the market supports premium prices for items that would have been considered disposable or not long for this world when they were first used.

Perhaps the "new" crock looks something like this one, sold recently at Crocker Farm Auction for $345. According to Crocker Farm, the five gallon crock dates to about 1880 and is likely from Ohio. It is marked: “A. BOOTHS SOLID MEAT OYSTERS."

It's hard to say what this dealer's next thing will be. In the mean time, I'll keep an eye out for one of them oyster crocks.

Material Culture Minute: Start 'Em Young

It turns out I was conditioned from birth to appreciate flea markets, yard sales, and antique malls. Here, I tried to get out of my stroller and go exploring at Pioneer Village in Bloomsburg, PA, with family (I returned many times thereafter as a kid). Nearly thirty years after this photo was taken in 1985, flea market vendors are still using those distinctive tables. And I study material culture for a living.

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: Call for Papers

Call for Proposals

Eleventh Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars

University of Delaware / Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library

Saturday 20 April 2013

Deadline: 5 pm 30 November 2012

Embodied Objects: Material Culture Studies in Three Dimensions

The Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware invites submissions for papers to be given at the Eleventh Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars.

Focus: The objects we create, manipulate, and consume mediate our experience with the world. We seek a broad range of papers that highlight the intersection between objects and humans, things and people. We're interested in how three-dimensional objects act as extensions of ourselves, provide repositories for memory, help stabilize identity, interrupt our sense of scale and space, give permanence to relationships, and mirror human forms. Papers may also address how objects mediate human sensory experience and create aesthetic meaning. We encourage papers that reflect upon and promote an interdisciplinary discussion on the state of material culture studies today.

Disciplines represented at past symposia include American studies, anthropology, archaeology, consumer studies, English, gender studies, history, museum studies, and the histories of art, architecture, design, and technology. We welcome proposals from graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and those just beginning their teaching or professional careers.

Format: The symposium will consist of nine presentations divided into three panels. Each presentation is strictly limited to eighteen minutes, and each panel is followed by comments from established scholars in the field. There will be two morning sessions and one afternoon session, with breaks for discussion following each session and during lunch. Participants will also have the opportunity to tour Winterthur’s unparalleled collection of early American decorative arts and to engage in a roundtable discussion on Friday, April 19. Travel grants of up to $300 will be available for presenters.

Submissions: The proposal should be no more than 300 words and should clearly indicate the focus of your object-based research, the critical approach you take toward that research, and the significance of your research beyond the academy. While the audience for the symposium consists mainly of university and college faculty and graduate students, we encourage broader participation. In evaluating proposals, we will give preference to those papers that keep a more diverse audience in mind.

Send your proposal, with a current c.v. of no more than two pages, to emerging.scholars@gmail.com.

Deadline: Proposals must be received by 5 p.m. on November 30, 2012. Speakers will be notified of the vetting committee’s decision in January 2013.

Confirmed speakers will be asked to provide symposium organizers with digital images for use in publicity and are required to submit a final draft of their papers by March 11, 2013.

Material Culture Minute: Christian C. Sanderson Museum

Filing past the parade of the national and the personal artifacts (melted ice from the South Pole, family Berlin work on perforated cardboard, a lock of George Washington's hair), I caught myself reaching and (almost, but not quite) grabbing objects as if I were browsing at an antique mall.  One of the reasons I felt compelled to shop is that many of the exhibits at the Christian C. Sanderson Museum in Chadds Ford, PA, provide minimal interpretation.  In other words, there are very few conventional "tombstone" labels and text panels here placing the objects in the war room within the larger context of American history.  Second, many of the artifacts include or are accompanied by hand-written provenance notes, which I love.  Therefore, it was easy to slip into "shopping" mode.

For those of you who are not familiar with this magical place, you should consider visiting when you're in the area.  The Museum was thoughtfully arranged and curated after Sanderson's death in the 1960s, and it has been lovingly made available to the public since then by a dedicated group of volunteers.  The Museum is housed inside Sanderson's home; two floors include a series of exhibits featuring about 1,500 of the museum's 18,000 objects.  The artifacts have been arranged by subjects such as "war" and "school."  (Despite these organizing themes, the war room does, in fact, include World's Fair memorabilia.)

The museum is still "collecting."  Here, a jar rediscovered around 2004 is displayed with matches.  Both jar and matches had been in the attic of the Sanderson since the 1967 "clean-up."  Christian C. Sanderson Museum, Chadds Ford, PA.

Yet just because a museum is inside someone's home does not mean that it is a house museum in the traditional sense (or what I believe to be the "traditional" sense).  In many house museums, the rooms   are as much a product of the curators who essentially "decorate" (with a lot of learned historical precision) as they are of the people who previously inhabited them.  There are plenty of exceptions, as there are plenty of house museums out there that have been barely touched since the last person who live inside of them died.  Therefore, the rooms at many house museums can be anywhere on a continuum in terms of the extent to which they truly represent how they looked as homes before they were museums.  One might argue that the Sanderson is not, in fact a house museum; it is not furnished in a way that would be a reasonable approximation of how Sanderson experienced his abode. There are two reasons why this doesn't look a like a "house."

First, what you don't get until you start flipping through some of the photographs on display in binders is that Sanderson was what we might call an extreme accumulator: upon his death, Sanderson's home did not look as neat and orderly as it does now.  Exhibiting the rooms in that state would make the spaces physically inaccessible.  Second, piles of stuff would not highlight the "collection" in the way that the museum can now.

And yet it is difficult to make sense of this place without the "home" or "house" context. When Tyler and I visited, we enjoyed a mini tour with a knowledgeable and friendly volunteer who started us off with a history of the how Sanderson and his mother used the home.  "The front room was originally inhabited by a blacksmith; Mrs. Sanderson used this room as a bedroom," etc.  The volunteer provided some of the much-needed context, as the collection makes little sense without it.  Even with the context, visitors are still left largely to ooo and aaah.

A panel on the second floor encapsulates how one observer remembered Sanderson: "He  has given his life to things that mean most -- in understanding American history, and understanding the American purpose."  If we were to take the Museum as an embodiment of that "American purpose," what might we conclude that "purpose" to be?  Maybe understanding this purpose derives from the objects that embody the history with which they are labeled, and the meaning of these objects is different for every visitor.  Perhaps that's the beauty of the museum.  Certain objects were selected to be displayed.  Many of these objects are labeled with notes that explain their links to the past.  Many objects are grouped thematically.  But aside form those "institutional" interpretations, you can make your own history.  There might be some missed interpretative opportunities here, but it was refreshing to concentrate on looking rather than reading.

Here comes Peter Cottontail:  a collection of Easter eggs associated with Anderson and his family, 1886-1944. Christian C. Sanderson Museum, Chadds Ford, PA.  

Further Reading

Visit the Christian C. Sanderson Museum web site to learn more about this enchanting Museum: http://www.sandersonmuseum.org/.  

If your interest in antiquarians and relics was not quelled with this post, you might like to learn about John Fanning Watson and his relics at Winterthur:  Yvette Piggush, "Fancy History: John Fanning Watson's Relic Box," Common-Place 10, 1 (October 2009).

For more on Easter-related objects from early America, check out Winterthur's exhibition "The Easter Bunny and a Decorated Egg: Two Rare Early American Treasures."

Material Culture Minute: A Dispensing Pot

Stale cigarette smoke and dust. The odor combination that usually signals a good antiquing venue. Earlier this week while on an antiquing mission in New Jersey, Tyler and I combed the stalls of one such establishment, picking through the 1990s-era Barbies (perfect for the eBay pickers I spotted herding "collectibles" to the counter) and the nineteenth-century ceramics (perfect for us).

On the first floor, near the booth filled with scavenged Civil War finds (a no-no, Tyler says), I spotted a small nineteenth-century dispensing pot, or medicine jar, featuring a printed label that boasted the ointment's ability to cure gout, among other impairments.

I recently completed a research project involving gout (an illness famed dictionary writer Samuel Johnson summed up as “The arthritis; a periodical disease attended with great pain”) and material culture, so you will not be surprised to learn that I immediately fetched a clerk to open the glass case.

I pointed to the little ceramic pot, and the clerk expressed surprise at my taste in "smalls."

"That medicine container?" She asked.

"Yes, please."

While she admired some shinies in the case, I cradled the pot in my hands, running my fingers over the spots, stains, and cracks.

"That looks old," the clerk said.

"A huh," I muttered with a smile.

After a few moments of connoissing, I told her I'd take it. She ferried it off to the counter for safe-keeping while Tyler and I made our way through the apartment building-turned antiquing haven, absentmindedly singing along to the increasingly nauseating Christmas tunes. By the time we reached the Pyrex booth in the former kitchen of apartment no. 3 (they made that many colors of Pyrex?), we were tuckered out.

So what did I bring home?

It's called a dispensing pot, which is an antecedent of the twist-top medicine bottle you have in your own medicine cabinet. This particular pot contained a so-called patent medicine "cure-all" manufactured by Holloway of London. As defined by the trusty Oxford English Dictionary, a patent medicine is "a proprietary medicine manufactured under patent and available without prescription." The label is self-explanatory. It lists ailments ranging from gout to ringworm. This particular pot was sold in New York. Other pots were sold in London and, of course, "by most Vendors of Medicine throughout the civilized World." President Theodore Roosevelt and Congress took a stand against such chicanery with the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, but not before untold numbers of gout and ringworm sufferers tried concoctions like Holloway's.

Thomas Holloway (1800-1883) established his business in 1837, and he sold his medicines through the late nineteenth century. The Science Museum in London holds a few Holloway ointment ceramics in its collection, which you can view online here. The objects at the Science Museum are crisp, clean, and clear, so I suspect that the pot I bought was someone's privy pit find.


And now, it is my find. What shall I put inside?

Further Reading

For a good explanation of the history of patent medicine, check out the "History of Patent Medicine" online exhibit produced by the Hagley Library in Delaware.

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.