Scribbled Notes

Ulrich: An improbable assembly of objects from different times, places, and sensibilities, as eclectic as a colonial revival house museum or a New England bed-and-break. Not meant to represent a moment in time. A memorial to the people who saved things.

How do ordinary people create meaning out of the world? Words cannot convey what really like, cannot recapture everything.

Introduction: History more than crimes, follies, and misdeeds: physical description of daily life. A democratic education? Hidden hand of history. Conventional narrative freezes out some in favor of another.

Idealizing women in the late nineteenth century justifies the new economic order. Distorted history. The silent work of ordinary people in the pat is like electricity, which, though unseen, goes through and masters thr world, holding all atoms to their places, and quickening even the life of our bodies. Electricity becomes historic only in a storm., though only by tunder. The historian must connect electricity to thunder. Objects nineteenth century Americans collected can help u do that by calling attention to the unseen technologies, interconnections, and contradictions that lie beneath events.

Undersrtanding what people collected reveals why they might have cared. No colonial dame ever wore a dress like hers. Different but a desire to associate with certain virtues. Vision of colonial America saturated in sentiment and encrusted with contradiciton, but they preserved artifacts and documents, rescued old buildings, aroused public interest for historical institutions, revived dying arts, and stimulated new forms of scholarship, contributions too important to be forgotten and question too much with us to be left unchallenged.

Sheep and textile trade as important as guns for taking over America. Artifacts tell us mot when they are imbedded in the rich texture of local history. As a work of pastoral embroidery, the chimmneypiece is a reminder that idealizations of rural life predated the colonial revival. Deeper meaning related to poor kids in spining schools

Basket shifts attention away from the violence of late seventeenth century to our own generation’s hopes for multiculturalism.

Relying heavily on written textual sources limits our capacity to represent reality. All five senses in their intellectual affective, expressive, and communicative practices, with each providing different kinds of information with people creare unique and interchangeable forms in each of these sensorial domains. Objects ae also active agents in the production of history: crowns, scepters, etc make a monarch,

Lets people unable to write have a voice. Psyhcobabble, history would look different if you took objects seriously. The use of material culture for the writing of history entails the use of both theoretical or conceptual work that addresses the relation between people and things in the abstract, that focuses on those relations under particular forms of economy and polity. It also requires careful reflection on the relation of texts and things, how people have represented their object worlds in writing or used textual invocations of objects. In this domain, it is literary scholars who provide the greatest assistance.

Wartime austerity kind of caused it, but lets infer this as well:
Can’t establish with certainty, but it is likely that many objects reflect the convictions of their makers.
“Artisans would not, however, have made these goods if no one wanted to buy them. But who would want such things? Although they were far less luxurious than furnishings and decorative items from the late Old Regime or the Directory, the purchase of such durable and encumbering, yet fragile, items in the middle of revolutionary upheaval suggests both means and a very powerful commitment to republican principles. . . . Consumers could have simply continued using their pre-Revolutionary domestic goods. It would appear, therefore, on the basis of the evidence of material culture that at least some French citizens took the politicization of everyday life further than did those writing law and political tracts, making their domestic interiors stylistically compatible with the political moment in which they were participating.

So what?