Centering material culture when researching those with scant documentary evidence of their lives can help fill in the gaps of their experience.

Commemoration, commerce, and complex social connections combined to dictate the paths and diversions of this obscure object and others.

“The life of a citizen,” they reminded the all-male jury, “lies in the hands of woman.” The result made prosecuting sexual assaults among acquaintances all but impossible.  

Cycling culture offered individual women, as well as couples, greater freedom in daily life.

This was how I stumbled upon the extraordinary life of Anandi Gopal Joshee, known more informally as Anandibai (bai, a term of respect for Marathi women), the first Indian woman to have come to the United States to pursue a medical degree in 1883.

Clothing studies are too often overlooked by historians and even material culture scholars. Kate Haulman makes an overdue and important […]

If there was one thing Revolutionary orators knew, it was that if you wanted to move people to action, you had to touch something deep within them.

Frédéric Etienne Joseph Feldtrappe’s Traite des Nègres (ca. 1825)

“In 1767 the author of a letter to the editor of the New York Journal bemoaned the fashion that led women to double the size of their heads with the use of pomatum, artificial pads, and hair procured from corpses. But most distressing of all, the writer claimed, the ‘frizzled’ style resembled the ‘shock head of a Negro.'”

The banyan announced something about the inner mind and character of the man who wore it.

The rise of the handkerchief was not simply a function of shifting social mores. It was also a part of the “civilizing process” through which the haves became readily distinguishable from the have-nots.

On a frigid Boston night in January 1774, a crowd of American colonials tarred and feathered a hated customs official.

Teaching in historical clothing helps to tell the story of how wider societal transitions affected the lives of ordinary people.

“Jefferson repeatedly relied on the common symbol of homespun, much as he wore the best clothes he could find while in France, but when he dressed even further down as president he knew that his slippers would be understood differently by different people.”

At a slim forty-seven pages and mere twenty centimeters high, the weightiest thing about the 1770 book, Directions for the […]

Those Separatists who emigrated directly from England and those who had just left Leyden, Holland, would have been equals in their ability to recognize that whaling could be an immensely profitable business.

The ribbon holds enormous potential for students of American military and political culture during the American Revolution, as well as of eighteenth-century American art history.

At the heart of Commerce by a Frozen Sea is the beaver hat, which by the seventeenth century had become an essential […]

  AT ATKA In February at AtkaI stood on the black sandsbelow the trading postand watched my husbandfade up the […]

In Frontier Seaport: Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt, Catherine Cangany explores what might best be called the “soft economics” of Detroit’s integration into the Atlantic world.

“I had seen lots of sheets like this in New England museums but I never expected to find one in a research library. I was tempted to unfold it to its full length just to see the reaction of the sober scholars seated at the polished tables around me.”

“Even after a woman mastered painting’s technical skills and the theory that stood behind them, she encountered the nagging problem of publicity. A successful artist had to exhibit and advertise. She necessarily exposed herself to strangers as she drummed up a clientele and again when she sat down to capture their likenesses. The training needed to transform raw talent into polished style was beyond most women’s reach just as the demands of professional painting were at odds with the standards of feminine decorum.”

In late December 2001, my husband Mark, kids Lily, Max, and Sam, and I were at the end of a […]

Whereas during the Revolutionary era wearing American-made clothes signified frugality and private sacrifice for the public good, by the mid-nineteenth century wearing American-made clothes signified prosperity and the rapid growth of the nation’s internal commerce and industrial capacity.

In answer to Ben’s comment, of course Sir Lord Baltimore counts, and who could forget Paul Revere and the Raiders, […]

This summer, public television stations across the U.S. aired The 1900 House, a four-part series billed on PBS’s website as […]

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