American Material Culture

A few days ago I picked up a pretty good volume. 


Martin, Ann Smart, and J. Ritchie Garrison, editors. American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field. Winterthur, Del: Henry Francis Du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997


It comes out of the American Material Cultures conferences that had been happening at The Winterthur Museum one of the best museums for American decorative arts. The book covers both direct and theoretical writing on material culture. The introduction is a good overview of the broad range of disciplines and theoretical outlook of the field. Like most good volumes it presented other works that I want to track down. 


The first chapter is about the development and significance of the American axe.  A great read about how the american axe came to be differentiated from and then dominate the European axe market. 


The third chapter is about the use of animals in Victorian objects. 


Also included in the work are chapters that cover the development of the hunting shirt, Tupperware, and the often overlooked owners manual. 


The chapter on owners manuals is interesting because I had never thought about how items became more complex a larger public needed to have a way to access technical data and operations. I had taken it as a given that they existed, but they are a development that arose out of particular technological and sociological circumstances.  


There is a chapter about dolls and doll play that I have not read yet. It looks fruitful to finally explain to me the cultural appeal of dolls. 


There is also a chapter about the introduction and spread of the pizza in the U.S. 

Louise Brigham’s Box Furniture

This is an interesting article on part of the early arts and crafts movement in America that I was not aware of.  While a student I desperately wanted to have a nice house interior and I used the modern boxes that were available, the milk crate. They lacked the style found in these wooden boxes.  I even at one time had a chest o' drawers (without the drawers) made from cardboard boxes. One chap I know in town is collecting box wine boxes to make his couch out of. Well, hopefully those days are done for me and I can have some nicer antique furniture for the home, however the social implications of this book are fun for me to think about. I am sure that many a piece of 'box furniture' if it has survived has been sold as a 'primitive' (a questionable and classist term that needs to be dealt with in the future).  At any rate I am going to try and track down her book or a reprint because I want to peruse it. I figure that will be time well spent.

Well the good news is that my university's library has a copy and it is just in the stacks. This means I can go and pick it up this afternoon. No special permissions, collections or anything. Wonderful!