The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture

Most historians rely principally on written sources. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians: the material things that people have chosen, made, and used. This book examines how material culture can enhance historians' understanding of the past, both worldwide and across time. The successful use of material culture in history depends on treating material things of many kinds not as illustrations, but as primary evidence. Each kind of material thing-and there are many-requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Creative historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying more traditional text-based documents even as they borrow methods from these fields. They can think through familiar historical problems in new ways. They can also deploy material culture to discover the pasts of constituencies who have left few or no traces in written records. The authors of this volume contribute case studies arranged thematically in six sections that respectively address the relationship of history and material culture to cognition, technology, the symbolic, social distinction, and memory. They range across time and space, from Paleolithic to Punk.

Ivan Gaskell is Professor of Cultural History and Museum Studies at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Sarah Anne Carter is Visiting Executive Director of the Center for Design and Material Culture and Visiting Assistant Professor of Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Introduction: Why History and Material Culture? by Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter
Part 1History, Material Culture, and CognitionChapter 1: Words or Things in American History? by Steven ConnChapter 2: Artifacts and their Functions, by A.W. EatonChapter 3: Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order: A Jewel from the Early Modern Pearl Industry, by Mónica Domínguez TorresChapter 4: Food and Cognition: Henry Norwood's A Voyage to Virginia, by Bernard L. HermanChapter 5: On Pins and Needles: Straight Pins, Safety Pins, and Spectacularity, by Amber Jamilla MusserChapter 6: Mind, Time, and Material Engagement, by Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden
Part 2History, Material Culture, and TechnologyChapter 7: Material Time, by John RobbChapter 8: Remaking the Kitchen, 1800-1850, by J. Ritchie GarrisonChapter 9: Boston Electric: Science by "Mail Order" and Bricolage at Colonial Harvard, by Sara J. SchechnerChapter 10: Making Knowledge Claims in the Eighteenth-Century British Museum, by Ivan GaskellChapter 11: The Ever-Changing Technology and Significance of Silk on the Silk Road, by Zhao FengChapter 12: Science, Play, and the Material Culture of Twentieth-Century American Boyhood, by Rebecca Onion
Part 3History, Material Culture, and the SymbolicChapter 13: The Sensory Web of Vision: Enchantment and Agency in Religious Material Culture, by David MorganChapter 14: Sensiotics, or the Study of the Senses in Material Culture and History in Africa and Beyond, by Henry John Drewal Chapter 15: The Numinous Body and the Symbolism of Human Remains, by Christopher AllisonChapter 16: Symbolic Things and Social Performance: Christmas Nativity Scenes in Late Nineteenth-Century Santiago de Chile, by Olaya SanfuentesChapter 17: Heritage Religion and the Mormons, by Colleen McDannellChapter 18: From Confiscation to Collection: The Objects of China's Cultural Revolution, by Denise Y. Ho
Part 4History, Material Culture, and Social DistinctionChapter 19: Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300-1450, by Daniel Lord SmailChapter 20: Cloth and the Rituals of Encounter in La Florida: Weaving and Unraveling the Code, by Laura JohnsonChapter 21: Street "Luxuries": Food Hawking in Early Modern Rome, by Melissa CalaresuChapter 22: Ebony and Ivory: Pianos, People, Property, and Freedom on the Plantation, 1861-1870, by Dana E. ByrdChapter 23: The Material Culture of Furniture Production in the British Colonies, by Edward S. Cooke, Jr.Chapter 24: Material Culture, Museums and the Creation of Multiple Meanings, by Neil G. W. Curtis
Part 5History, Material Culture, and MemoryChapter 25: Chronology and Time: Northern European Coastal Settlements and Societies, c. 500-1050, by Christopher LoveluckChapter 26: Materialities in the Making of World Histories: South Asia and the South Pacific, by Sujit SivasundaramChapter 27: Mapping History in Clay and Skin: Strategies for Remembrance among Ga'anda of Northeastern Nigeria, by Marla C. BernsChapter 28: Remember Me: Sensibility and the Sacred in Early Mormonism, by Laurel Thatcher UlrichChapter 29: Housing History: The Colonial Revival as Consumer Culture, by Thomas DenenbergChapter 30: Collecting as Historical Practice and the Conundrum of the Unmoored Object, by Catherine Whalen
Conclusion: The Meaning of Things, by Peter Burke