American Material Culture Commons^™

Our Leschi: The Making Of A Martyr, Alexander Olson

Alexander Olson

In1929, Nisqually Indians erected a tombstone over the grave of Leschi, a former tribal leader who had been executed in 1858 for the murder of a local white man. Leschi's remains were moved to the gravesite in 1917 after the federal government had condemned his previous resting place, on the Nisqually reservation, for an expansion of Fort Lewis. This was the second time that Leschi had been reburied. In 1895, his remains had been moved from his original gravesite just outside the reservation boundaries. His memorialists knew better than to inscribe "Rest in peace" on his tombstone.

Review: 'Fighting Traffic: The Dawn Of The Motor Age In The American City', John Alfred Heitmann

John A. Heitmann

During the early 1960s, as the Golden Age of the automobile in America began to wane, several commentators, including Lewis Mumford, raised the critical question of whether the automobile existed for the modern city or the city for the automobile. How and when the automobile became central to urban life is deftly addressed in Peter Norton’s Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. This study is certainly one of the most important monographs focusing on the place of the automobile in American society within a historical context to appear in recent times; it interestingly supplements …

Review: 'Storied Independent Automakers: Nash, Hudson, And American Motors', John Alfred Heitmann

John A. Heitmann

Nash, Hudson, and now even American Motors are automobile brands that have largely disappeared from the American memory. Yet, despite riding the twentieth-century economic roller coaster and operating in the shadow of the Big Three, these firms made sustained, significant technological and economic contributions. Charles K. Hyde’s Storied Independent Automakers is the author’s latest foray into the area of automotive business history, following work on the Chrysler Corporation and the Dodge brothers. A professor of History at Wayne State University, Hyde has written a needed critical business history on an important topic that complements the vast amount of “buff” and …

The Akron Offering: A Ladies' Literary Magazine, 1849-1850, Jon Miller

Jon Miller

FREE FULL-TEXT PDF DOWNLOAD From 1849 to 1850, Calista Cummings edited and published Akron's first literary magazine, The Akron Offering. At the time, Akron was a booming canal town on the verge of even greater prosperity. By turns religious, comic, romantic, and political, this extraordinary collection of early midwestern creative literature expresses a wide range of sometimes contradictory opinions on both the important questions of its day and the important questions of today: historical events such as the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the 1848 revolutions in Europe are considered alongside more timeless contemplations on truth, justice, and beauty. …

In Search Of The Wind-Band: An International Expedition, Daniel Rager

Dan Rager

In Search of the Wind-Band: An International Expedition is a new interactive E-book, exploring 16 countries.

The first-of-a-kind, interactive encyclopedic e-book uses text, video, mp3 and pdf files to bring the history and development of the wind-band to life.

1. Overture: What Constitutes a Wind Band? - 2. Introduction to European History and Development - 3. Historical Homogeneous Wind-Bands - 4. American Wind Music - 5. Denmark Wind Music - 6. Finnish Wind Music - 7. Industry Wind Bands - 8. Ireland Wind Music - 9. Japanese Wind Music - 10. Mexican Wind Music - 11. Native American Indian Wind …

The Plymouth Lutheran Cemetery, Lindina Township, Juneau County, Wisconsin;, Lawrence W. Onsager

Lawrence W. Onsager

Cemeteries have been called outdoor museums, cultural artifacts, and written and visual records of communities. I am attempting to produce a geographically local biographical or cultural landscape study. In some cases cemeteries are the only identifiable remains of a community. The Plymouth Cemetery records that I have enhanced are just a part of the rich history of the Suldal Norwegian American Community in Juneau County, Wisconsin. It was estimated in 1908 that there were about 1,200 Norwegians from Suldal and about 500 from Upper Telemark in the settlement. Suldal is a rural district in Rogaland County in western Norway. Originally, …

The Young White Faces Of Slavery, Mary Niall Mitchell

Mary Niall Mitchell

No abstract provided.

City Of Syracuse Historic Resources Survey: Washington Square Neighborhood, Volume 2: Survey Forms, Samuel D. Gruber Dr., Bruce G. Harvey Dr.

Samuel D. Gruber Dr.

Historical overview and map analysis of the Washington Square Neighborhood of Syracuse, New York, originally the Village of Salina settled in the late 18th century. The survey also includes block by block descriptions and identification of sites eligible for local and or National Register historic designation.

City Of Syracuse Historic Resources Survey: Washington Square Neighborhood, Volume 1, Samuel D. Gruber Dr., Bruce G. Harvey Dr.

Samuel D. Gruber Dr.

Historical overview and map analysis of the Washington Square Neighborhood of Syracuse, New York, originally the Village of Salina settled in the late 18th century. The survey also includes block by block descriptions and identification of sites eligible for local and or National Register historic designation.

Blood-Stained Linen And Shattered Skull: Ford's Theatre As A Reliquary To Abraham Lincoln, Erika Schneider

Erika Schneider

No abstract provided.

"The Real Ida May: A Fugitive Tale In The Archives", Mary Niall Mitchell

Mary Niall Mitchell

No abstract provided.

Inventing The Egghead: The Battle Over Brainpower In American Culture, Aaron Lecklider

Aaron S. Lecklider

Throughout the twentieth century, pop songs, magazine articles, plays, posters, and novels in the United States represented intelligence alternately as empowering or threatening. In Inventing the Egghead, cultural historian Aaron Lecklider offers a sharp, entertaining narrative of these sources to reveal how Americans who were not part of the traditional intellectual class negotiated the complicated politics of intelligence within an accelerating mass culture. Central to the book is the concept of brainpower—a term used by Lecklider to capture the ways in which journalists, writers, artists, and others invoked intelligence to embolden the majority of Americans who did not have access …

The Seven Spices: Pumpkins, Puritans, And Pathogens In Colonial New England, Michael Sharbaugh

Michael D Sharbaugh

Water sources in the United States' New England region are laden with arsenic. Particularly during North America's colonial period--prior to modern filtration processes--arsenic would make it into the colonists' drinking water. In this article, which evokes the biocultural evolution paradigm, it is argued that colonists offset health risks from the contaminant (arsenic poisoning) by ingesting copious amounts of seven spices--cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, allspice, vanilla, and ginger. The inclusion of these spices in fall and winter recipes that hail from New England would therefore explain why many Americans associate them not only with the region, but with Thanksgiving and Christmas, …

Artful Identifications: Crafting Survival In Japanese American Concentration Camps, Jane E. Dusselier

Jane E. Dusselier

"Artful Identifications" offers three meanings of internment art. First, internees remade locations of imprisonment into livable places of survival. Inside places were remade as internees responded to degraded living conditions by creating furniture with discarded apple crates, cardboard, tree branches and stumps, scrap pieces of wood left behind by government carpenters, and wood lifted from guarded lumber piles. Having addressed the material conditions of their living units, internees turned their attention to aesthetic matters by creating needle crafts, wood carvings, ikebana, paintings, shell art, and kobu. Dramatic changes to outside spaces of "assembly centers" and concentration camps were also critical …

Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium, And Justice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

THIS PAPER IS THE CO-WINNER OF THE FRED BERGER PRIZE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LAW FOR THE 1999 AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE BEST PUBLISHED PAPER IN THE PREVIOUS TWO YEARS.

The conflict between liberal legal theory and critical legal studies (CLS) is often framed as a matter of whether there is a theory of justice that the law should embody which all rational people could or must accept. In a divided society, the CLS critique of this view is overwhelming: there is no such justice that can command universal assent. But the liberal critique of CLS, that it degenerates into …