History From Things: Essays on Material Culture

by Stephen Lubar (Editor)

   History from Things explores the many ways objects—defined broadly to range from Chippendale tables and Italian Renaissance pottery to seventeenth-century parks and a New England cemetery—can reconstruct and help reinterpret the past. Eighteen essays describe how to “read” artifacts, how to “listen to” landscapes and locations, and how to apply methods and theories to historical inquiry that have previously belonged solely to archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and conservation scientists.

   Spanning vast time periods, geographical locations, and academic disciplines, History from Things leaps the boundaries between fields that use material evidence to understand the past. The book expands and redirects the study of material culture—an emerging field now building a common base of theory and a shared intellectual agenda.

Genres: Material Culture, History, Nonfiction, Theory

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 17, 1995

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was fine, though interesting primarily as an illustration of just how far material culture scholarship as well as interdisciplinary discussions emphasizing "things" have come in the past couple decades. Though the contributors to the volume ranged across a variety of disciplines, there was an emphasis on anthropology and archaeology, and a real desire on the part of most contributors to focus on things that did not have documented histories (so, certainly not documents themselves). Kingery's selection that distinguishes the way material culture scholars situate things at the center of their studies (rather than understand them to be products of design) was a good, basic way to articulate how an examination of an object needs to pay attention to the policies, practices, and attitudes that circulate around it. His desire to look at the aesthetic properties of objects (also echoed by other contributors to the volume) was also appreciated. Nonetheless, the volume doesn't have any essays that better clarify later contributions to material culture scholarship, and a contemporary reader would do better to pick up a more recent anthology to get newer citations.