When looking closer at the presence of marine specimens at American anti-slavery fairs, it becomes clear that these objects were more than items of natural curiosity. 

It was a relentless circle of brutal exploitation in which the salt raked by Mary Prince and other enslaved people was sold to northern fishermen who sold it back southward in the form of salted fish with which to feed the enslaved who raked the salt.

I was shocked to find that British newspapers in early August 1863 described the Portrait being “entirely destroyed” by fire on a railway train.

Again and again, the filmstrip shows its viewers images of women in states of distress.

For those in later years, the bell’s value lay not in its powerful sound, but in its visual representation.

Even before the miniaturization of mokuks as souvenir items, these folded birchbark baskets served as trade items that also facilitated diplomacy between Native and colonial nations.

Part of the utility of the game is how many intersections can be addressed, a Choose Your Own Adventure of lesson planning.

Understanding puzzles as agents of disorder runs counter to a common interpretation that associates puzzles with the quest for and ultimate affirmation of order.

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

The outlines of “salvation antiquarianism”—with the emphasis on “saving” both in terms of preservation and Christian redemption—appears particularly clearly in the AAS’s inaugural 1813 address.

What happens when we place furniture into a context of lively and fraught interaction?

“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.  

To put it otherwise, we cannot naturalize or uncritically center the extant assemblage of materials. We must historicize and contextualize why certain belongings, stories, and memories are visible, and others much less so.

The Quaker spiritual journey, often invisible due to its silent, humble and individual nature, is illustrated in this map.

The poems of “Kingdom” are spirit-drawings, in the tradition of the Harmonists’ erstwhile Shaker acquaintances. On occasion they quote bits of Harmonist texts.

Confederates’ quest for bones thus connects to a bizarre history of the use, and misuse, of human remains. Bones from the Bull Run battlefield were taken as acts of domination and displayed as trophies of war. However macabre, human remains became part of the deeply variegated material culture of war.

Arnold’s unceasing efforts to elevate himself in society through marriage and professional work can be viewed through the lens of the houses he bought or built throughout his life.

Before we move forward, it is a good time to look back on the history of Commonplace and its place in digital humanities over the last two decades.

The set of 552 images is impossible to describe as a single body of work, but the illustrations cohere.

Podcasts serve as a gateway to other media about history, serving as a tool for historians to engage with people who have an interest in the stories they tell.

“[R]everence for the document is key to how people today think of the Constitution.”

America’s ambivalence about labor is nothing new. In the colonial era the ruling class had nothing but contempt for anything that could be justly called “work.”

Skilled slaves, North and South, worked in nearly every craft … but the fruits of their labor are often unmarked or uncritically attributed to their masters.

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

Sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation A delicately woven ivory silk map, embroidered in the first years of the nineteenth century, […]

Searching for the prey of an effective censor makes the thrill of discovery especially tantalizing, since the “treasure” is not meant to be found.

If blackmail is ultimately about silence, and if silence cannot—by definition—be tracked, how is one to find signs that blackmail might be present?

“This flag is the first foreign banner that was ever carried through the great city.”

“As a result of their proximity to legal proceedings, many tavern keepers worked as common lawyers in addition to running their hostels.”

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

New information on Henry Box Brown, an enslaved man who would turn escape into an art form.

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.”

The reasons for keeping funeral broadsides may have been genealogical: the lyrical remembrance of ancestors perhaps struck a balance between the heraldic crests found in living rooms across America and the magnetic poetry on the fridge.

A more extravagant disregard for instructions on his second expedition would lead him deep into California—still a part of Mexico—and would win him not censure, but fame.

Sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation.

What can making now tell us about the past? Or should the past remain untouched? 

Like the agents and reagents of a chemical demonstration, Winthrop’s specimens illustrated a fundamental transformation as they were unpacked from their crates: not a transformation in their material state, per se, but rather an alteration of the New World environment and the political economy of colonial New England according to Winthrop’s careful designs.

Is there anything more ludicrous than the present day barbeque contests in which contestants are prohibited from supplying meat that might be more sapid than those of their fellows?

Along with the broadening of the palate came a taste for dining rooms suited to more epicurean appetites. Indeed, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the designated dining room had become a central fixture of the Victorian home.

Keys are border-phenomenon that split the world into a within and a without and, in the seventeenth century, record a surprisingly tight fit between subject and object.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

. . . assemblages of pictures in domestic installations—sometimes described as home altars—allow for the creation of a dream world or alternative visual environment from which the viewer can derive a complex web of meanings.

Why does any piece of the past survive?

“Few places in American history have been so much to so many: a house for parents and children; a workplace for slaves and servants; and, for the Indians who journeyed there from as far as Nova Scotia and South Carolina, an embassy, a store, and a clearinghouse for news.”

Embroidered orchards and peony hair ornaments testify that women were practitioners of floral display, but many women sought knowledge as well as style.

While primly stitching Eve’s fall from innocence on her canvas, Christina likely reflected on the brutal consequences suffered by those who succumbed to temptation in her everyday world.

Although Puritans designed their service in direct opposition to the Catholic mass, its practitioners’ version of the Lord’s Supper had more in common with the mass than they wanted to admit.

Sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation Busts are odd things. Heads free of their bodies, severed at the shoulders, often at […]

John Fea argues that the American Bible Society was an eminently American institution that sought to build a Christian nation.

Here was a Bible that had not only come over on the Mayflower in 1620, but had belonged to some of the most prominent early settlers, according to annotations on its pages . . . Could it be true?

If history is any guide, the Treasury Department has an uphill fight ahead of it; counterfeiters have a knack for circumventing almost any obstacle put in their way.

“The thing is a fake from beginning to end,” Corning replied.

Highly anticipated among scholars of American art and American cultural history alike, Wendy Bellion’s Citizen Spectator is among the most significant book-length […]

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“The anatomical museum was not just a transgressor of public morality, it was a notorious, flagrant transgressor, a public institution devoted to the display of things that should not be displayed.”

Nineteenth-century viewers were just as likely to envision war through the more personalized lens of the family album as through the battlefield.

Through its mythic participation in Penn’s Treaty, the wood of the Treaty Elm became saturated with associated moral values and lessons.

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.

Could we assume that this lowly agent of a midsize flour dealer on the lower Delaware was behaving like Jay Gould a hundred years later?

Growing increasingly three-dimensional and more ornate with every added layer of material, sentimental or “fancy” valentines, as they were called, were harbingers of hope, fondness, and desire.

Salisbury’s purchases clearly evoke the image of a young man concerned with meeting the expectations of Worcester’s privileged class.

Erotic standards are also historically contingent: what would have raised eyebrows in the eighteenth century often seems laughably tame, even quaint to the modern viewer.

A meditation on early nineteenth-century Chinese portraits of George Washington.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Peter Parker’s pickled paintings
Cause of nausea, chills & faintings”

Ink covers much of the wood work, various parts have been gouged by nails or other sharp tools, the bar handle has been smoothed by the hands of many journeymen printers, and overall the press has the worn but proud look of an old veteran.

From imaginary vantage points along major streets, [writers] traced the life of the metropolis from its first vigorous stirrings before dawn through its murmurs and rustlings deep in the night.

Not everyone in colonial Philadelphia was pleased about having the hours rung on the state house bell.

In eighteenth-century America, Christmas gift exchange was marked by a powerful reciprocity: one gave a present and received one back

The growing popularity of dolls had both ideological and pragmatic roots in the emerging middle class.

“At ninety dollars, they’re hardly cheap, and their price tag is part of their appeal. These are not intended to be superficial toys.”

Is slave food soul food?

Bon appétit!

A cane only appears once in Leaves of Grass, but it turns up in conjunction with another word that appears again and again in the poem: lean.

The gravestone surely served as a memorial for Desire Tripp and her family, but, as I came to learn in the course of my research, it also served as a site of local memory for individuals who never knew the family personally.

The gap between academic and popular understandings of early American topics is an enduring challenge for early Americanists. In the case of Thanksgiving, that gap is widening.

“Unlike West, Peale, and Trumbull, who gaze piercingly outward at viewers, Goodridge refuses a returning gaze, due not to modesty but to distraction.”

Nationalists […] aimed to rally Americans with the cry that the young nation could teach Old Europe a lesson or two about the industrial age on its own turf.

Man is the only picture-making animal in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of the earth has the […]

Civil War Monuments and the Funerary Sphere In a quiet glade amid the trees and lawns of Boston’s Forest Hills […]

In an election year where claims to transparency seem deeply opaque, Foutch recalls the moment when the way to save democracy was clear as glass.

Constant attacks from weather, in addition to the mechanization of landscaping, conspire to destroy these stones as they once stood. Ironically, New England’s historic cemeteries are dying.

After spending the summer of 1890 in Venice, the American painter Thomas Moran boarded a steamship with a seemingly odd (and cumbersome) souvenir.

In a world where not everyone could read or even speak a common language, everyone could make music, and did.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even in more recent times, international trade by sea simultaneously created conditions of intense isolation and exhilarating social interaction.

To plan for the observation of the events central to the history of seventeenth-century New England, a partnership of organizations and individuals was formed as New England Beginnings in 2015.

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.

Material culture interfered with the seemingly inexorable rise of racialism in Louisiana, creating its own chronology, and highlighting the uneven development and fractured character of the process of racialization in North America.

While our own culture shields itself from the prospect of death, our nineteenth-century forebearers embraced it.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“The timepiece boasted a calendar wheel and a moon dial, and it played seven tunes, one for each day of the week, and added a psalm for Sunday.”

What started out as just wanting to make a few paintings of whales ultimately became an eight-year project, with still no end in sight.

Sinéad Morrissey pays homage to revolution and to pattern-breaking, considered through a jigsaw puzzle mapping North America.

Native oral traditions tell us not only about Native histories but also about global imperial conquest and can be interpreted as literal accounts of colonial interaction.

  Read Statement on Poetic Research for Two Pieces   Cape Cod 1837 [found document: obituary] Jan 19, 1837, Barnstable County […]

Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet) I had been twice to Pondbefore I learned you hadnot only been there, but filmed it.Of course […]

Forgetfulness is like a songthat, freed from beat and measure, wanders Hart Crane When knowledge will cover the earthlike water covers […]

One particularly intriguing new feature is the “signature quilt” search function, which features name and location data for about fifty quilts with multiple signatures.

Americans love stories of the Revolutionary era, even if, as recent comments by leading politicians about Paul Revere, the geographic […]

This is quite a big, startling argument.

If self-serving performances of civility were common, so were misguided inferences from them.

As an undergraduate at Wake Forest University, I joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. While I appreciated little of the […]

For Roylance, nineteenth-century imperial eclipse narratives did not serve as purely cautionary tales nor as negative examples.

A critical awareness of the process of working, and sometimes failing, to conceptualize history and its possible futures, says Klein, is what the humanities can offer data visualization.

The extensive republic was a deliberate creation in the realm of print.

Trompe l’oeil invites us to undeceive ourselves of the fiction before us, and in so doing, it posits that the senses can detect and explain deception.

 Davis brings to poetics a newly enlivening framework of gesture, relation, and immediacy that boldly recasts how we read these poets, and with it the worldly work of poetry.  

The next morning I was discussing My Bondage

Sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation. The Indigenous objects that once resided in early American collections present powerful opportunities for institutions to reflect on their own entanglements with centuries-long patterns of dispossession and settler colonialism.

David Shields’s book about Southern foodways contains the seeds of many future conversations.

Beginning with Thomas’ initial gift of 2,650 titles, the research library currently boasts nearly 750,000 volumes, over 2 million newspaper issues, as well as large collections of periodicals, graphic arts, children’s literature, and manuscripts.

At a time when the wealth of the new nation derived from farming, importing exotic plants […] and establishing the systems of practice needed to make plants valuable were vitally important.

Caroline Winterer describes America as “a vast Enlightenment laboratory” but one cannot easily imagine Winterer’s exuberant, capacious and eclectic American […]

This book has many virtues. A chronological look at the architectural implications of food preparation and consumption in America from […]

Paul Revere was the only major patriot who was also a founder—literally. He started a successful iron foundry in 1788, […]

“We Used to Wait,” the second single from Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs (2010), begins like most of the songs on the record—with a […]

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

Culture in the Age of the […]

In these galleries, the museum’s curators have been able to unite many of its familiar objects with less familiar ones that had formerly been relegated to storage, more than doubling what had been on view before.

These poems and images are the result of a sort of excavation of my paternal grandmother’s well-worn Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book (copyright 1950, and how!).

Tennenhouse urges us to look beyond the political schism of the Revolution toward a generic English culture that was reproduced and adapted in colonial North America and that ironically became even more English after the colonists won political independence.

Sloane’s embrace of the past ran counter to a stream of thought that was prominent from the beginning of European settlement in North America, one that held that the “New World” represented an opportunity to turn away from the past, and from the ruins and relics of Europe in particular.

Although menagerie owners emphasized the educational value of their exhibitions, they were clearly driven by economic rather than educational imperatives. Menageries were both capital-intensive and risky ventures.

Sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation.

Thinking about books as objects that were processed, stored, and packaged by industrialists (I use the term advisedly, instead of “printer”) like Isaiah Thomas helps re-orient the way we think about literature in early America.

Sarah Nehama’s catalogue In Death Lamented was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name that she curated […]

In the afterword to The Potter’s Hand, its author, A. N. Wilson, identifies the novel as a work of historical […]

Exploring the materiality of early American paintings and prints, Jennifer Roberts’ excellent new book spans the 1760s to the 1850s in three fascinating case studies, each involving the complex transport of art.

Work required Americans to keep a close eye on the natural world, for most still wrung a living from understanding and manipulating nature.

How would we, the voyagers, find quiet moments for reflection on this remarkable voyage? How would we behave among strangers?

Oldest Windmill on Cape Cod

The neat separation of feminine and masculine spheres existed more as an ideal than as a fact.

The Greeks were the cradle of the West. No others need apply.

The lines between high and low culture were blurry in nineteenth-century America. Dime novels lacked critical acclaim, yet famous authors like Samuel Clemens readily drew from dime novel conventions.

I set out to make something totally arcane relevant.

If Mather’s portrait inspires reverence, another object associated with him helps bring him down a bit from his lofty position: his childhood highchair

Sailors were not really supposed to sleep. They were supposed to work.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

The disputed result of the 2000 election brought questions of materiality and meaning, which are frequently studied in academic settings, to the streets and the courts.

Almost immediately upon starting a book I ask myself—usually while reading—what will I read next: should it be more fiction? a history book? current events? pure escape? enrichment?

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

More and more, we point our computers’ browsers at what we want to read, instead of lacing up for a walk to the library or the bookstore.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Jacob Perkins had invented a technology so elegant, and so perfect, that security printers would rely on it for the better part of two centuries.

His descriptions of Poll were not as a bird in its own habitat, but as his companion.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“The fascination of American men of letters with Henry Moss, the African American seeming to turn white, however, mirrored their denial of the possibility that whites might turn black.”

Economic panics are telling historical moments that reveal the structural complexities of the interdynamics between the global and local.

The stereograph comes to America

Viewing this rare artifact was a great highlight in a journey that has consumed my life for the last six years.

One may still hear such wardrobes called “armers” in the Deep South, where they were ubiquitous in an era before built-in closets and pantries became de rigeur.

The willy-nilly growth of the nation that had made its postal system a logistical marvel also required the establishment of a hub to process misdirected letters.

This coin box was created by the Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) in late 1839 to […]

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“When he first met them, Hesselius found Indians repulsive.”

Not until the end of the nineteenth century did people begin to think that Monticello, as a historical place, should be preserved in something like its “original state.”

It has been several decades since large numbers of Americans used the U.S. mail for the majority of their long-distance communications or for casual daily contact with nearby friends and family.

With so many uses, the almanac, like an iPhone, was truly interactive.

How Durben in Glasgow Became Dearborn in Quebec I discovered a Revolutionary-era journal written by a Captain Durben—from an unexpected […]

Two inches wide and eleven feet long, it mapped, among other things, a reunited nation.

ed books are not only a marvelous technology in their own right but are rich with lifelong associations… [But textbooks] are rarely regarded as anything other than databases.

Can less produce more?

Why did I leap into this project—and why did I stick to it?

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Our authors help us notice that men and women who are curious are themselves sometimes turned into curiosities.”

Accounting was not an orderly process, but rather a vigorous and open-ended mixing and remixing of information.

“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.”

This is the Abraham Lincoln of America’s monuments.

Dickinson did not regard the book as a meaningful unit of analysis for her work, but too often, her editors and critics have.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Before the secret ballot became the national standard, election ballots were a vivid genre of print ephemera.

Narrative histories of action make us exceedingly conscious of the sequence of events over time. But time plays hide and seek in these small fragments.

My search for Mehetabel’s diary had entailed a good six months of concentrated—and at times seemingly futile—effort. When I finally held it in my hands, however, every moment of that search seemed worthwhile.

“In effect, the cemetery becomes a history laboratory where students can chart and graph gravestone styles and inscriptions according to the specific increments in time in which they first appear, reach the height of popularity, and finally fade out.”

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“How do we then account for the transition from curios to antiques? Why was the change in nomenclature and character so rapid?”

Linnaeus, sitting at home in Uppsala while his students traveled all over the world collecting natural objects for him, could be quite peevish and demanding.

…printing shifted from a craft to an industry, printers became publishers, authorship became a profession, literary property became regulated, and reading became, increasingly, a value as much as a practice.

The devotional culture of early New England did not predict or facilitate a straight line from sin to salvation.

Contending with the physical characteristics of various woods and the way they respond to machines and the hand has . . . helped clarify how I think about history.

Colonial newspapers generally located maps with goods that in turn were associated with literacy and refinement, in particular with interior decoration and visual culture.

I imagined that my investigations might end up in a decisive graph that would map the number of pages printed against the number of Buddhist converts to Christianity.

Were [Fijians] a race of their own or a mix of many?

This stamp pattern book opens up a rare glimpse into a small nineteenth-century American business, revealing just how many designs one man produced in his lifetime.

It is hard for Kelso to shake off a heritage that seems at once so romantic and so compellingly patriotic.

“So when we’ve lost our traditions we can come here and learn them from you.”

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

. . . scrapbooks created to save newspaper and magazine items often used few of the pictures from those publications. Perhaps pictures undercut the seriousness of a homemade object that mimicked the look of a book or newspaper.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Authenticity was always an important part of the freak show’s promotional rhetoric, which advertised exhibits as LIVE! TRUE! REAL! GENUINE! Despite such hyperbolic claims of veracity, the exotic act was the most easily and regularly fabricated of all attractions.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

For three thousand years, these peoples made a homeland of the sea enclosed by Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji. Hava’iki, they called it. They sailed the circuit of the sea with confidence. They traded. They raided. They adventured.

Every museum has—must have—some unstated rules of inclusion, organization, and interpretation. But the musée du quai Branly’s rules seemed designed to undermine its own premises.

People relied on memory and touch to help navigate their homes in the dark. Memory, hearing, touch, and even smell made it possible to travel in the countryside on moonless nights

In the Great Hall, there is such a sense of sameness in the men’s appearances that it does not take much effort to see that personality has been deliberately tamed for the sake of assembling an artificial society, a seamless superstructure open to being expanded, contracted, and reconfigured by house fiat.

This Article is Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Value means nothing unless it is translated into “real” money. And yet real money is no stable store of value.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Advocates of paper money did not deny its risks, but they also saw it as a resource that could expand the money supply and, in so doing, facilitate exchange and stimulate enterprise.

“Do [these pamphlets] represent what the Atheneum’s generous donors perceived as important materials of the day, things that any major cultural repository should hold?”

The most significant accomplishment of America’s Founding Food is the truly impressive collection of lively and illuminating primary-source accounts.

Among artists and craftsman, Lovell notes how kinship and patronage were often closely aligned.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

What then can the history of the asylum tell us about meanings and forms of liberal culture?

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

The design of the communion spoon and the silver beaker reflected the political values that held together the first British Empire.

Is the linear novel the only way one gets lost in a book?

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

The layout of a voting machine harbors implications about meaning, about what is and what is important, and therefore harbors politics in its broadest sense.

Starting in the dining room, I stared blankly at the large gold-framed portrait of a young woman. Although I had walked past her a hundred times, I had never stopped to ask, “Who is she, the woman with knotted braids gracing her rose-tinted cheeks?”

We know a fair amount about theories of trial procedure, but scarcely anything about the courtrooms in which lawyers and judges practiced.

“Boni did not seek to replace titles, but to induce librarians to supplement their collections with cabinets full of some of the world’s greatest and rarest works—and, of course, the patented machines necessary to read them.”

“Given its unique origins and historical identity, the Smithsonian would seem to deserve protection not just from private exploitation but also from the rigid ideological prescriptions of some of its would-be defenders.”

A mere four hundred British families applied to live for three months in London’s retrofitted 1900 House, but nearly ten times as many Americans are seeking to live for twice as long in the far more physically grueling Frontier House.

“The time had come to liberate the parchment after fifty years, a step fraught with uncertainties and concerns.”

Simple, yet significant teaching moves can result in students who can make informed decisions, who can develop reasoned arguments, and who can engage in problem solving.

“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.”

When biometrics look to a face it is to identify a person, when physiognomy looks to a face it is to identify that person’s permanent moral character. Yet, each attempts to control mobility and the instability it brings to the social order by turning to bodies in general and faces in particular.

Unlike the courthouse, church, town hall or other purpose-built public structure, the public market of the first half of the nineteenth century welcomed everyone–the farmer with his cabbages to sell, the housewife in search of dinner, the indigent widow-huckster provisioning her basket, and those with nowhere else to go to find shelter, sociability, a job, or a cheap meal.

“People expect to find in American Memory every kind of historical documentation possible on every aspect of American history, and they communicate their surprise at discovering otherwise.”

“People expect to find in American Memory every kind of historical documentation possible on every aspect of American history, and they communicate their surprise at discovering otherwise.”

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.

David and Ginger Hildebrand co-founded the Colonial Music Institute, which conducts and promotes research and offers information and resource materials […]

“Late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century mug books are collections of biographical sketches, a curiously rich source for genealogists and historians alike.”

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“For a kick I clicked on the description and viewed the item. I couldn’t believe it.”

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“As early-nineteenth-century Americans set out to conquer the western wilderness, this mythical creature helped them imagine themselves as new rulers of the natural world.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The water brought life to the slope—and sometimes death.”

“What the journals provide, then, is access to any number of subjects–gender, race, exploration, the self, humans and nature–for which they have been only lightly used.”

“Did the family-owned San Antonio printing company really print the paper money that helped finance the Mexican Revolution, as the current owner has heard rumored? Is the salty old New Englander right when he says that the whaling ship his grandfather skippered out of New Bedford sheltered escaped slaves among its crew?”

“Taverns were far more numerous than any other type of architectural space besides dwellings.”

EBay may be a great resource for avid collectors, but it has also opened up a world of antiquarian goods that may have never found their way into an archive or museum before now.

“Why this judgment about whether or not the participants really lived the life of 1883 homesteaders? Is the experiment a success if they feel as though they were homesteading or only if they convince the experts that they’d worked hard enough to survive the winter?”

I quickly realized that much more so than my other public-history projects, Colonial House had to weave historical accuracy with modern-day reality.

“Two hundred years before the advent of computer technologies, Americans were already escaping into virtual reality.”

[T]his wasn’t a time to be an “objective historian.” This was a time to indulge, for a moment, the warm, vaguely melancholy feeling that comes from connecting to the past and to remember why I became an historian in the first place. And it was time to learn more.

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

Perhaps the bottle traveled to the swamp full, part of a social gathering of African people, rather than empty, as part of a haul of refuse. The bottle could have been a pilfered item, or one reused after Brewton discarded it.

“What Mount Vernon Love Story offers are not steamy sex scenes, of which there’s nary a one (was it the teeth?), but countless moments spent in the throes of hot, throbbing interior decorating.

Why do history in the form of a comic book? Why use this particular medium as opposed to others? What can the comic book offer in the presentation of the past that is unique and compelling?

From the model of scholarship and teaching he provided, I learned that the greatest of historians–such as himself–do not tolerate intellectual arrogance whether in others or in themselves.

Instantly there is a strong spark and stroke, and the whole line of gold, which completes the communication, between the top and bottom of the bottle, [appears] a vivid flame, like the sharpest lightning

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