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This book probes the materiality of Improvement in early 19th century rural Massachusetts. Improvement was a metaphor for human intervention in the dramatic changes taking place to the English speaking world in the 18th and 19th centuries as part of a transition to industrial capitalism. The meaning of Improvement vacillated between ideas of economic profit and human betterment, but in practice, Improvement relied on a broad assemblage of material things and spaces for coherence and enaction. Utilizing archaeological data from the home of a wealthy farmer in rural Western Massachusetts, as well as an analysis of early Republican agricultural publications, this book shows how Improvement’s twin meanings of profit and betterment unfolded unevenly across early 19th century New England. The Improvement movement in Massachusetts emerged at a time of great social instability, and served to ameliorate growing tensions between urban and rural socioeconomic life through a rationalization of space. Alongside this rationalization, Improvement also served to reshape rural landscapes in keeping with the social and economic processes of a modernizing global capitalism. But the contradictions inherent in such processes spurred and buttressed wealth inequality, ecological distress, and social dislocation.
The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology is a multi-authored compendium of articles on specific topics of interest to today’s historical archaeologists, offering perspectives on the current state of research and collectively outlining future directions for the field. The broad range of topics covered in this volume allows for specificity within individual chapters, while building to a cumulative overview of the field of historical archaeology as it stands, and where it could go next. Archaeological research is discussed in the context of current sociological concerns, different approaches and techniques are assessed, and potential advances are posited. This is a comprehensive treatment of the sub-discipline, engaging key contemporary debates, and providing a series of specially-commissioned geographical overviews to complement the more theoretical explorations. This book is designed to offer a starting point for students who may wish to pursue particular topics in more depth, as well as for non-archaeologists who have an interest in historical archaeology. Archaeologists, historians, preservationists, and all scholars interested in the role historical archaeology plays in illuminating daily life during the past five centuries will find this volume engaging and enlightening.
A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Industry covers the period 1760 to 1900, a time of dramatic change in the material world as objects shifted from the handmade to the machine made. The revolution in making, and in consuming the things which were made, impacted on lives at every scale –from body to home to workplace to city to nation. Beyond the explosion in technology, scientific knowledge, manufacturing, trade, and museums, changes in class structure, politics, ideology, and morality all acted to transform the world of objects. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds. Carolyn White is Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA. Volume 5 in the Cultural History of Objects set. General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte
William Faulkner once said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Nowhere can you see the truth behind his comment more plainly than in rural New England, especially Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts. Everywhere we go in rural New England, the past surrounds us. In the woods and fields and along country roads, the traces are everywhere if we know what to look for and how to interpret what we see. A patch of neglected daylilies marks a long-abandoned homestead. A grown-over cellar hole with nearby stumps and remnants of stone wall and orchard shows us where a farm has been reclaimed by forest. And a piece of a stone dam and wooden sluice mark the site of a long-gone mill. Although slumping back into the landscape, these features speak to us if we can hear them and they can guide us to ancestral homesteads and famous sites. Lavishly illustrated with drawings and color photos. Provides the keys to interpret human artifacts in fields, woods, and roadsides and to reconstruct the past from surviving clues. Perfect to carry in a backpack or glove box. A unique and valuable resource for road trips, genealogical research, naturalists, and historians.
It outlines a fresh approach to the archaeological study of the historic cultures of North America.
Historical and archaeological records show that racism and white supremacy defined the social fabric of the northeastern states as much as they did the Deep South. This collection of essays looks at both new sites and well-known areas to explore race, resistance, and supremacy in the region. With essays covering farm communities and cities from the early seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, the contributors examine the marginalization of minorities and use the material culture to illustrate the significance of race in understanding daily life. Drawing on historical resources and critical race theory, they highlight the context of race at these sites, noting the different experiences of various groups, such as African American and Native American communities. This cutting-edge research turns with new focus to the dynamics of race and racism in early American life and demonstrates the coming of age of racialization studies.
The definitive volume on how paint has been used in the U.S. in the last 250 years. Eminent contributors cover the history of this medium in American buildings from the 17th century to the end of the 19th century. Contains a survey of practices and materials in England, cutting-edge techniques used by today's researchers in examining historic paints, fascinating case studies and an important chart of early American paint colors. Explains how to identify pigments and media, how to prepare surfaces for application and apply paint. Includes the chemical properties of paint with a table of paint components, plus a glossary and bibliography.
In this volume of essays, historical archaeologists and scholars from a variety of other fields explore creative approaches to material culture as a form of cultural expression. The essays, derived from papers first presented at the 1991 Winterthur Conference, emphasize material culture's communicative qualities; its roles in social performance, the construction of identity, and the mediation of interaction; and its interpretive limitations. A special concern with contexts in their myriad forms resonates throughout the volume. The contributors not only describe time and place but they seek the intimate social and symbolic details of human agency in all their diversity. The essays reveal how dynamic archaeological thinking can appeal to a broader audience. The first section, "Construction of Context: Negotiating Consumer Culture", groups six essays that foreground people and their choices in diverse consumer contexts. The authors examine the ways that material culture illuminates the cultural dialogues between New England's native peoples and European traders, urbane Virginians and their "country cousins", Southern slaves and their owners, agrarian potters and industrial capitalists, and nineteenth-century Americans and the brokers of consumer culture. In the second section, "'In the Active Voice': Remaking the American Landscape", the attention shifts from people to the land they inhabited and changed. Through close reading of multiple data sources at many scales, from microscopic pollen grains to urban plans, the authors of these four essays trace the remaking of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American farms and cities. In the third section, "Working toward Meaning: The Scopeof Historical Archaeology", the authors work outward from the preceding studies, directly engaging the reader in the process of reinventing historical archaeology. Together with the other contributions to this volume, these three concluding essays demonstrate the important place of historical archaeology in the interdisciplinary arena of material culture studies.