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Full-Text Articles in American Studies
Labor At Home: The Domestic World Of Workers At The Du Pont Powder Mills, 1802-1902, Margaret M. Mulrooney
Labor At Home: The Domestic World Of Workers At The Du Pont Powder Mills, 1802-1902, Margaret M. Mulrooney
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
While the history of the du Pont family and Du Pont Company have been well-documented, little is known about the everyday lives of the Irish Catholic immigrants who lived and worked at the home plant near Wilmington, Delaware. to correct this oversight, "Labor at Home" explores every aspect of the powder workers' domestic world--from religious beliefs, family structure, gender relations, and ethnic ties, to houses, furnishings, and yards--and uses this data to support new conclusions about cultural identity and class affiliation. as early as the 1820s, for example, powder mill families began to convey their increasing affiliation with bourgeois American …
Ship Of Wealth: Massachusetts Merchants, Foreign Goods, And The Transformation Of Anglo-America, 1670-1760, Phyllis Whitman Hunter
Ship Of Wealth: Massachusetts Merchants, Foreign Goods, And The Transformation Of Anglo-America, 1670-1760, Phyllis Whitman Hunter
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This study examines capitalism and cultural change in early New England. The research focuses on leading merchants in Boston and Salem, Massachusetts from the last third of the seventeenth century to 1760. During this period, merchants, royal officials, and professionals formed a prominent influential elite that refashioned the town landscape and social structure of colonial ports. Merchants adopted a new Anglo-American worldview that gradually supplanted Puritan spiritual and providential understanding of the world and, instead, emphasized visible, material characteristics as the source of value in science, commerce, and consumption. The resultant "world of goods," created a social marketplace where identity, …
"Preserving Their Form And Features": The Role Of Coffins In The American Understanding Of Death, 1607-1870, Brent Warren Tharp
"Preserving Their Form And Features": The Role Of Coffins In The American Understanding Of Death, 1607-1870, Brent Warren Tharp
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation is a study of the American coffin, its origins, forms, and meanings especially with regard to its role in the integration of death in American society before 1870. Coffins have generally been ignored by material culture studies primarily because of our society's cultural uneasiness with the topic of death. Current American funeral and burial practices seem bizarre and ahistorical and have often been characterized as the result of twentieth-century commercial greed. However, coffins have a long history as important artifacts which American society has used to legitimize death in subtly different ways for generations. This study examines the …
Facing Philadelphia: The Social Functions Of Silhouettes, Miniatures, And Daguerreotypes, 1760-1860, Anne Ayer Verplanck
Facing Philadelphia: The Social Functions Of Silhouettes, Miniatures, And Daguerreotypes, 1760-1860, Anne Ayer Verplanck
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
In 1807, Charles Fraser lauded fellow miniature artist Edward Greene Malbone's ability to produce "such striking resemblances, that they will never fail to perpetuate the tenderness of friendship, to divert the cares of absence, and to aid affection in dwelling on those features and that image which death has forever wrested from it." The explanations traditionally given for the commissioning of portraits--the perpetuation of family or institutional memory--correspond with Fraser's comments. Yet these explanations rarely incorporate the social context: the communities in which images were produced and the individual, familial, or group meanings of portraits.;"Facing Philadelphia: The Social Functions of …
"The Road To Ruins And Restoration": Roland W Robbins And The Professionalization Of Historical Archaeology, Donald Walter Linebaugh
"The Road To Ruins And Restoration": Roland W Robbins And The Professionalization Of Historical Archaeology, Donald Walter Linebaugh
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Roland W. Robbins helped to pioneer the profession of historical archaeology. as the discipline professionalized, he found himself increasingly excluded. This study analyzes Robbins's career within the context of the disciplines of archaeology and historic preservation and considers the professionalization process, current cultural resource management practice, the value of early data, and the importance of public archaeology.;The study also explores archaeology as Robbins's solution to his long personal crisis of vocation. He reacted to his coming of age during the Depression by searching for personal foundations and also responded to larger cultural needs, including a quest for the roots of …