A Material World

With the material turn in the 1990s, historians started to embrace the methodologies of interdisciplinary fields such as American studies, material culture studies, anthropology, and archaeology. In the process, these scholars began to close the artificial divide between academic studies of the decorative arts and museum studies of objects. In their elegantly edited volume A Material World, the editors George W. Boudreau and Margaretta Markle Lovell honor the namesake of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Robert McNeil Jr., and showcase work that embraces new questions about and avenues into the study of things. Arguing that the challenge for three decades in American material culture “has been ... harnessing the visual (and tactile) power of objects to questions that enlarge our understanding of first-order scholarly problems,” the editors have chosen eleven studies that successfully use objects to address these “first-order” scholarly questions (p. 1). While criticizing the collection for limiting the chapters to the study of a colonial elite and, in a few cases, an emergent middling culture would be easy, doing so would not do this book justice. It is beautifully illustrated, and each chapter adds something important to our understanding of colonial Anglo-America. In part 1, “Canvas and Culture,” Boudreau and Carol Eaton Soltis explore the paintings of Benjamin West and Charles Willson Peale beyond their painterly qualities, seeing them as representations of status and nationhood. In part 2, “Objects with Meaning,” Ellen G. Miles offers an intriguing deconstruction of artists’ materials and craft traditions, while Paul G. E. Clemens and Edward S. Cooke Jr. explore clocks in Fairfield, Connecticut, first as markers of status and then as organizational tools in a young nation increasingly aware of time. In part 3, “Spaces of Power,” Stephen G. Hague's Atlantic study of James Logan's home, known as Stenton, examines the uses of objects for status and authority. Lovell offers a sophisticated study of Monticello's “trophy heads,” arguing that Thomas Jefferson intentionally created a “précis” of Western civilization as it converged with New World history. And Jennifer Van Horn employs the complex built structures of southern dressing tables to show the fine line between self-fashioning and counterfeit. In part 4, “Revolutions of Image and Place,” Nancy Siegel uses images to understand Britain's maternalistic relationship with the American colonies, and Emily A. Murphy centers her study on Elias Hasket, who used material culture to enter a community of creditworthy merchants. In part 5, “Imagining Pasts,” both Patricia Johnston and Laura C. Keim explore the historical “life of things”—a painting of the pilgrim landing at Plymouth and relics collected by John Fanning Watson—to demonstrate that history making is a participatory process

American studies · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Craft · Culture of the United States · Deconstruction (building · Elite · Epistemology · Honor · Literature · Material culture · Meaning (existential · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Visual arts · Visual culture · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity