Material culture最新文献

{"title":"Crooked Road: The Story of the Alaska Highway","authors":"K. A. Sculle","doi":"10.2307/3637421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3637421","url":null,"abstract":"Crooked Road: The Story of the Alaska Highway By David A. Remley Fairbanks: AK. University of Alaska, 2008. xvii + 253 pp. 22 halftones, 3 line drawings, 1 map, notes, and index (paper), ISBN 9781602230378.Heavily based on lengthy quotations of oral sources and lacking a thesis asserted at the book's beginning, this book might seem to deserve less attention among scholars than a work of standard academic format Indeed, the preface is an elaborate disclosure of how the book evolved from the author's personal life, as if this book were a literary expression And the author again grounds the second preface accompanying this 2008 edition in his personal life, this time, in a dedication to the respondents, many since deceased, who made this book possible . As this book unfolds, however, appreciation grows for the subject's importance, which is well-grounded in sources, not only the respondents', but in archival paper sources listed chapter by chapter (but not footnoted) at the book's end . These notes are expanded into often lengthy discussions of their own .Part One opens with a 1910 quotation from Robert Perry, the first North Pole explorer, alluding to the attraction to traveling to the North . After this vague beckoning, chapter one embodies descriptions of various people and circumstances attending travel along the Alaska Highway in August 1973 and ends when the author discloses in the last sentence that he was among them . A year earlier, 31 years before \"the pioneer Alcan Highway approached completion\" (p . 13), the American and Canadian administrators had created a plan for the road's construction as a life-and-death necessity for Alaska and Canada at the beginning of World War II, when Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor implied that empire's ambitious reach . Chapter two is opened with Canada's commitment to help build the road because President Roosevelt could \"give no reassurance\" that the United States could block an attack on Alaska . Thus, Remley's roundabout introductory narrative stages the reader's personalized admission to the subject as opposed to a more linear chronologyA tote road, road building jargon for a road to carry supplies, was completed in late 1942 on 1,400 miles between Dawson Creek, British Columbia, and the Richardson Highway south of Delta Junction, Alaska . It took 1,221 miles to reach Alaska Interspersed through the building description are such seemingly mundane matters as food . For example, \"[t]he Americans learned to appreciate the traditional Canadian winter-trail hot drink, tea . There was no coffee\" (p . 35) . Different cultures also distinguished the Americans from the Canadians; the former using much equipment and exercising considerable sophisticated engineering while the Canadians, questioning of American plans, were intuitive, tenacious, and counted on humor. In this example of cultural group distinctions along the highway, rare detailed evidence is gathered that often eludes material culture studies Remley ","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"39 1","pages":"82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80954646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Meetinghouses of Early New England","authors":"Timothy J. Parker","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-0686","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-0686","url":null,"abstract":"Meetinghouses of Early New England By Peter Benes Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. 446pp. Maps, illustrations, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95, ISBN 978-1-55849-910-2.For several decades now, historians of architecture have been appropriating an increasing variety of perspectives and interpretive frameworks in an effort to counter the seemingly ever-present tendency to reduce architecture to matters of narrative, concept, or style . Laudable and necessary as this agenda continues to be, an unintended and unfortunate consequence is that too often the scholar, and so the reader, loses sight of the building itself. Yet this methodological expansion of the field has also encouraged serious consideration of genres and types that have previously been ignored . And so vernacular traditions are now routinely taken seriously. No contemporary historian would be satisfied with Nikolaus Pevsner's mid-twentieth-century distinction between a bicycle shed (mere building) and Lincoln Cathedral (architecture), at least not in its dubious implications regarding how and why our knowledge of the built environment matters . Is it not clear that history aims to illuminate human culture and its endeavors, and that these encompass more than the monumental? Even so, some building types and periods present special difficulty, the early New England meetinghouse being a case in point .The remarkable achievement of Peter Benes's Meetinghouses of Early New England is perhaps best understood in the context sketched out above . His subject is emphatically vernacular from the outset, yet becomes gradually caught up, albeit never fully, in the development of architectural practice, the reception of official institutional styles, and the requirements of newfound political identity The wide variety of uses to which meetinghouses were put belies any easy typological conception In some places meetinghouses slowly become churches, as Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist societies looked to Anglican practice, while even the sparest Puritan meetinghouse held multiple meanings . And of the more than two thousand buildings under study here, ranging from 1622 to 1830, only about a quarter survive, most dating from 1790 or later. The subject is difficult to pin down, to say the leastThe book is divided into three parts: The Background, The Architecture, and Conclusions The middle part is by far the longest and conveys the bulk of the discussion of architectural particulars, including plan typologies, likely sources, and characteristic features (from seating to furnishings to massing to ornament and more) Across three chronologically ordered chapters Benes clarifies the detailed variations of the three basic period styles . First-period meetinghouses (1631-1720) tend toward squarish enclosures under steep roofs with gables on each side and central turrets; second-period (1699-1820), low-profile roofs running longitudinally, with an ","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"71 1","pages":"76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82828432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Visions from the Forests: The Art of Liberia and Sierra Leone","authors":"Laura A. Macaluso","doi":"10.5860/choice.185612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.185612","url":null,"abstract":"Visions from the Forests: The Art of Liberia and Sierra Leone Edited by Jan-Lodwick Grootaers and Alexander Bortolot Seattle and London: The University of Washington Press, 2014. 240 pages. Color images, catalogue of objects, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (paper), ISBN 9780989371810.This beautifully produced catalog that accompanies the exhibit of the same name was a tribute to collector and curator William (Bill) Seligman, who died in 2011 . A native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Seligman's efforts to document, collect, and teach the heritage of West African societies through material culture has been transferred to the major American art museums where his collection was divided and donated, including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (organizer of the exhibit); Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art; Indiana University Art Museum in Bloomington; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the St . Louis Art Museum; and the Brooklyn Museum, where he was curator from 1987 to 2007. Seligman's life and work exemplify 20th century efforts of westerners to share the rich culture and heritage of a geographic region in Africa that should be understood by more of us, certainly by Americans and Britons, as both Liberia and Sierra Leone have historical ties to the US and the UK due to the history of slavery and the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century.The catalog text stays away from overt politics, focusing instead on the social histories of the objects presented, but these are objects that survived the civil war that lasted more than a decade and that destroyed the museum collections that had been installed by Seligman in Liberia between 1965 and 1987. Seligman was part of the great political and cultural turn of the African Independence movements of the late 20th century and knew of the great atrocities committed during the war that began in 1989. His collection of West African materials is exemplary, and is part of a larger effort by anthropologists and historians to recreate and reanimate cultural heritage to include archives and documentary photography after much destruction and loss of human life .For this catalog, which serves to present both the connoisseur behind the collection and object history as it relates to use, the editors selected essays from seven cultural historians, who discuss the role of the forest for \"subsistence and sociability,\" including the gender distinctions of Poro (male) and Sande (female) society initiation activities, seen, for example in mask making . Artistic production thus reflects place, use, and materiality, however, Seligman included \"change and historical rootedness\" as wellThe essays contributed by Mariane C . Ferme, Paul Richards, Nanina Guyer, Frederick John Lamp, Daniel C . …","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"7 1","pages":"80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78598258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Empire on Display: San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915","authors":"David M. Carletta","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-2468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-2468","url":null,"abstract":"Empire on Display: San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 By Sarah J. Moore Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. xii + 240 pp. Figures, plates, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8061-4348-4.After the Panama Canal was officially open in August 1914, the United States turned to San Francisco to celebrate . In Empire on Display: San Francisco's PanamaPacific International Exposition of1915, art historian Sarah J . Moore describes the enthusiasm in San Francisco for honoring America's extraordinary accomplishment in Panama U S Secretary of the Interior Franklin K Lane gave a speech during the opening ceremonies of the Fair in February 1915 . Describing the United States as a nation still endowed with the optimistic, spirited manliness of its first pioneers, Lane asserted that the nation's greatest adventures were yet to be seen, adventures of an expanding democracy that would be faithful to the American pioneer's fortitude . According to Lane, those first pioneers had rightfully extended civilization across the harsh and unproductive North American continent . By forging a waterway through Central America, their descendants were continuing the noble mission of spreading civilization .As was typical for world's fairs, an official image was chosen to advertise the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The image selected to publicize this particular fair was the artist Perham Nahl's Thirteenth Labor of Hercules in which a brawny naked man separates the rugged terrain that hindered the union of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans . National development and empire building, the inevitable march of progress, and the achievement of modern technology over nature were unreservedly celebrated at the fair. Arguing that the difference between the continental and imperial frontier was disintegrated, the latter being understood as a reasonable and unavoidable augmentation of the former, Moore cites numerous examples of how the Fair coupled the United States' taming of its former western frontier with its global imperialist future. San Francisco's prosperity was seen as the marvelous result of nineteenth-century America's imperial project of Manifest Destiny Moreover, geographical position encouraged a sense of impending greatness, as Asian markets opened beyond the city's western horizonWhile the Panama Canal was widely celebrated at the fair, many aspects of American engineering proficiency were also highlighted For example, railway companies had a ubiquitous presence at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition . The First World War prompted an increase in national tourism that was noted and exploited by the railway companies, which aggressively promoted the \"See America First\" campaign while overseas travel was closed off due to warfare . With tourism developing as a business as well as a rite of U . S . citizenship, Panama-Pacific Exposition Company President Charles C . Moore embraced the American West","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"70 1","pages":"102"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85736975","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa","authors":"R. Trumble","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-1637","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-1637","url":null,"abstract":"Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa By Martin J. Murray Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. xi + 305pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8166-8299-7; $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8166-8300-0.How memory is preserved and observed is a subject often fraught with differing opinions . Memory scholars, among others, have highlighted the complex challenges entailed in creating memory sites through architecture, monuments, and other forms of material culture (Till 1999) . Commemorating and Forgetting continues this discussion through a focus on the relationship between material culture and memory in the context of contemporary South Africa . Murray argues that \"commemorative practices . . . are a specific kind of history-making exercise that aims to promote and secure particular interpretations of past events while at the same time impeding or erasing potentially divergent or rival readings\" (ix) . South Africa provides a setting that is rooted in historical and social practices, which allows for a thought-provoking exploration of places of memoryThe book explores the materialities of memory and place through a historical lens . Murray chooses an array of memory sites, which range from the Voortrekker Monument to Kruger National Park, to show the variety of ways in which memory is inserted into certain places . It is \"an engagement - provisional, selective, tentative\" (viii) . Murray is an urban planner, and this background serves him well in exploring objects of collective memory embedded in material landscapes . His key questions seek to examine the ways in which \"myth and memory play in the formation of collective identities\" and how certain histories are shared at the expense of other histories (ix) .Throughout the book, Murray explores how the collective identities materialize in specific landscapes . He begins by examining the works of memory scholars . The first chapter may be of special interest to those not familiar with memory studies and the ways memory shapes landscapes Murray creates a literature review of memory studies, and filters such literature into the specific context of South Africa in the second chapter The third chapter provides place-specific information about the challenges faced by post-apartheid communities of South Africa. Discussion of the complexities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is particularly interesting. Murray draws on Paul Connerton's \"prescriptive forgetting\" (68), to contend that \"the TRC failed to entertain the possibility that the extent of pain and suffering was so great as to irredeemably compromise or interrupt the possibility of communication, dialogue, and openness on the part of the victims\" (69) .The fourth chapter tackles the main subject of the book and engages the reader in the materialities of memory. Murray differentiates between the terms \"monument\" (constructed to hail a past victory) and \"memorial\" (to remember tho","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"11 1","pages":"103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87437901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Corn Palaces and Butter Queens: A History of Crop Art and Dairy Sculptures","authors":"Dawn M. Drake","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-1273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-1273","url":null,"abstract":"Corn Palaces and Butter Queens: A History of Crop Art and Dairy Sculptures By Pamela H. Simpson Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Xx + 249pp. Drawings, photographs, notes, and index. $90.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0816676194; $29.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8166-7620-0.Simpson's book on cereal architecture and dairy art, published posthumously, is an excellent study in an important, yet often overlooked, part of American material culture . Food art is something with which people are either familiar or completely unacquainted, which does not mean food art is unimportant . Simpson's book clearly illustrates the importance, not only literally with numerous images, including a series of color plates, but also figuratively with her extensive research and analysis .Simpson acknowledges the broad literature on world's fairs, agricultural expositions, and other events where food art was typically displayed in the United States . However, there was no scholarship that extensively documented specifically crop and cereal architecture or dairy sculpture, let alone put it in its broader social, cultural and historical context . The author took on a momentous task to not only look at the history of food art, which can be traced to the Romans in the first century CE, but to look at its position in society as an element of material culture . She examines the gendered space created by the roles men and women filled in the construction of food art . She briefly delves into racial issues by examining the work of Oscar Howe, a Dakota Indian who designed the Mitchell Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, from 1948 to 1971 . Her goal is to study corn palaces, crop art, and butter sculpture from 1870 to 1930, as a means of understanding beliefs, practices, and motives At the end of the book she positions food art in contemporary societySimpson clearly lays out three questions she wants her work to answer: 1) Where did the food art tradition come from? 2) Why were the pieces constructed? 3) What did the pieces mean to both the makers and the audience? She then sets forth, in seven chapters, to answer these questions, focusing first in chapter one on the history of food art in general, discussing early sugar art and food molds In chapter two, Simpson looks specifically at cereal architecture, which she defines as massive buildings covered in corn and other grains, such as the Mitchell Corn Palace, that people can walk through . This is different from crop art, which she defines as smaller sculpture and architectural forms, such as the Liberty Bell of oranges constructed for the California display at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago . Chapter three examines the history of butter sculpture in similar detail .Up through chapter three, Simpson's narrative focuses on defining where the traditions came from . The author then brings these histories together in chapter four, examining the role of cereal architecture, crop art, and dairy sculpture in a variety of ","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"55 1","pages":"107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83747458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?","authors":"Cadey Korson","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-0957","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-0957","url":null,"abstract":"The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? By Jared Diamond New York: Penguin Group, 2012. Vii + 499pp. Tables, figures, further readings, index, and illustration credits. $23.59, (cloth) ISBN 978-0-670-02481-0; $16.20, (paper) ISBN 978-1-101-60600-1.In his most recent book, Jared Diamond offers a series of lessons gleaned from decades of field research in spatially and culturally disparate indigenous communities . Through a comparison of modern states and traditional societies, Diamond presents a variety of lessons for the individual and the modern state Instead of comparing traditional and state-centered societies through a rational, cultural, or spatial approach, this text utilizes a more comprehensive method that includes all of these aspects . Using this comprehensive comparative method, Diamond elucidates several ethnographic-based conceptions of and lessons about everything from danger, to the treatment of children and the elderly, language, food, dispute resolution, and religion . The significance of this book lies in the vast wealth of anthropologic research and information about how traditional societies interact with their local landscape The lessons provided may be useful for some, but Diamond's take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards changing individual and state perceptions toward the previously-mentioned issues undermines his perceived emphasis on the significance of the information impartedEconomic anthropologists and historical geographers may find Diamond's discussion of traditional forms of trade and subsequent implications for the contemporary global economy interesting Relationships between societies are categorized in four distinct ways: defending boundaries, sharing resources, making war, and trading. Looking at the link between trade, goods, social networks, and class, Diamond identifies two critical similarities between traditional and modern state trade: the gathering of items to confer status, and in some cases, the exchange of some type of currency. For this purpose, Diamond attempts to organize a list of the following items commonly traded in the traditional societies he studies: \"necessities\" (raw materials and manufactured items), \"gray,\" and \"luxury\" categories (68-69) . His chart separates items that are immediately useful for survival and daily life from an intermediate category and luxury category The intermediate level comprises items that are both useful and impart some amount of status that make them valuable beyond their utility Luxuries or decorative items, meanwhile, are those that are not immediately useful for survival This three-part typology is useful in cataloguing items of trade, but also in identifying levels of socio-economic class, allowing one to make comparisons with market economies . Despite the usefulness of this typology in organizing goods and their socio-economic implications, Diamond argues that it is unreasonable to categorize items of trade by relegating them ","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"53 1","pages":"101"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86863955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Crafting Preservation Criteria: The National Register of Historic Places and American Historic Preservation","authors":"Shelley Grant","doi":"10.5860/choice.52-1038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.52-1038","url":null,"abstract":"Crafting Preservation Criteria: The National Register of Historic Places and American Historic Preservation By John H. Sprinkle, Jr. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2014. 244 pp. 10 greyscale figures, 6 appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $135.00 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-415-64255-2, $34.95 (paper), ISBN: 978-0-41564256-9 (paper), $34.95 (e-book), ISBN: 978-0-203-08083-2.John H. Sprinkle, Jr.'s book Crafting Preservation Criteria: The National Register of Historic Places and American Historic Preservation fills a prominent gap in the literature on historic preservation, material culture, and collective memory studies. Unlike geographical works by Tim Cresswell, Gareth Hoskins, and others that explore the assignment of cultural significance to physical places (2008, 393), Sprinkle practically reviews the contribution of early twentieth century US federal agents to the development of American site designation protocols during the so-called \"prehistory of preservation\" (6). His detailed consideration of the early decisions of preservationists exposes the mutability of early signification processes that is seldom evidenced in established commemoration processes. Although Sprinkle explicitly intends this work to inform students of preservation studies, his original chronicling speaks to interdisciplinary audiences. It critically reminds contemporary scholars of the uncertainties and imperatives that initially inspired politicians, government agents, and land use experts to act collectively for the preservation of American material culture and landscape.The book is unquestionably a masterfully researched and exceptionally detailed rendering of Sprinkle's reviews on sites that draw from original source materials. He deftly weaves together evidence on site decisions gathered from empirical work completed as Historian at the National Park Service (NPS), as well as his earlier published studies on disputes regarding the interpretation of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act criteria. His fluency in reviewing internal Park Service policies and the acts of leading personalities greatly enhances his ability to thematically organize stories about site categories and allows him to assess decisions involving sites situated in different geographical areas and with variable cultural significance.Given Sprinkle's command of the facts, the book is perhaps more narrowly focused than it ought to be. He limits the work to an examination of the series of decisions and deliberations about site authenticity and integrity that occurred in the three decades between the enactment of the Historic Sites Act of 1935 and the National Historic Preservation Act (or NHPA) in 1966. The author seeks to determine what changes in the interpretation of federal preservation criteria caused the tremendous \"expansion\" (2) in the number of properties listed in the National Register of Historic Places by the time President Richard Nixon issued the 1972 Executive Order 11593, whi","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"39 1","pages":"105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88944024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contested Spaces of Early America","authors":"K. Lee","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim020080037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim020080037","url":null,"abstract":"Contested Spaces of Early America Edited by Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 444pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-8122-4584-4.Pekka Hamalainen explains it best in her addition to Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman's edited Contested Spaces of Early America. Early American scholars - in an effort to move from limited British and Revolutionary-era narratives - have become too focused on the unique traits of contact and settlement that occurred in specific locations from 1492 to the 1800s. They have lost \"a sense of the whole\" (32). This monograph, a collection of essays dedicated to the memory of borderlands scholar David Weber, seeks to fill this exact void and to write a pan-American narrative of colonization organized around the concept of \"space.\"Space is defined in many ways by the twelve historians, art historian, and literary scholar who contributed to Contested Spaces. Perhaps the most unifying idea, however, is that of the \"vernacular landscape\" (25), adopted by Barr and Countryman in their introductory chapter. The term, initially proposed by J.B. Jackson, captures the book's strong attachment to geography and its authors' understanding that physical places influenced and were influenced by their settlers. Contested Spaces continues Weber's scholarship by focusing on shared indigenousEuropean spaces in the Spanish colonies and particularly in the North American Southwest, although essays set in Argentina, the Dakotas, Louisiana, Canada, and Kentucky are also included. This emphasis on shared spaces, Barr and Countryman suggest in the manner of Weber's Barbaros (2005), is because settlers across the Western Hemisphere were united by the basic experience of interacting with Native Americans, even if they did so in differing ways due to local conditions. The chapters in this text examine these encounters in more geographically-limited and case-study formats, but this early acknowledgement situates them well to achieve their overall transimperial aim.Indeed, the contributions that form Contested Spaces not only examine the interactions between Europeans, their descendants, and indigenous Americans via their particular landscapes. They, as the title indicates, apprehend these contacts as jointly shaped by conflict, if not direct violence. \"Blood talk\" (229), for instance, is the outright language employed by one essayist. The authors examine numerous forms of interaction among these peoples, including the following examples: sharing and disclosing knowledge in map-projects the impact of new guns, disease, and horses in the West, the enslavement and forced migration of indigenous laborers as imperial means-of-production, and the conflicting narrativizations of conquest evident in preserved and edited visual histories. A few contributors expressly attempt to get away from studies focused on militarization, notably Raul Jose Mandrini, who ex","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"167 1","pages":"102"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76640994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades","authors":"Stentor Danielson","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-3461","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-3461","url":null,"abstract":"Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades By Laura A. Ogden Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. xiv + 185 pp. 2 maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $67.50 (cloth), l$BN:9780816670260; $22.50 (Paperback), I5BN:9780816670277.We cannot escape the need to do battle with the idea of culture-nature dualism. As far back as Carl Sauer and the \"Berkeley School,\" and with increasing vehemence into the present day, cultural landscape studies in geography and related disciplines have taken the inextricable entanglements and unavoidably blurred boundaries between what we conventionally label \"culture\" and \"nature\" as their central problem. Each writer who comes along deems their predecessors' attempts on this score inadequate, and grapples with this eternal problem in their own way.Laura A. Ogden's Swamplife is a recent salvo in this ongoing war. Her subtitle announces the project - to show how people, alligators, and mangroves are entangled in the Everglades. (Though the term gator appears in the book's subtitle and some direct quotes, the text of the book is mercifully free of such colloquialisms.)Swamplife is about the practices of alligator hunters in the Florida Everglades from the beginning of the twentieth century until development and legal restrictions made hunting impossible by the 1960s. Ogden details the interconnection between human habits and the demands of nature for this particular set of poor white men. The book is largely based on interviews with surviving hunters, who describe their memories of the activities of their youth.She begins with the process of hunting itself, showing how hunters are intimately entangled with earth (the constantly-shifting substratum of alligator and human territory-making), fire (as a multifarious hunting tool), and flesh (of alligators killed by various techniques and stripped of their valuable hides). She describes how hunters must battle the alligators, but also become alligators in the process by imitating their behaviors. As the book goes on, she details the way hunters use the Everglades' environment to evade law enforcement.A substantial chapter details the tension between the entangled practices of the hunters and the pristine ideals of nature brought in by conservationists seeking to establish Everglades National Park and other conservation areas. Ogden's writing is at its best when she describes the ironic appropriation of local knowledge by scientists whose authority was premised on denying the validity of that very local knowledge. The book would have benefited from a similar, parallel chapter on the other primary threats to alligator hunters' way of life - developers, farmers, and the US Army Corps of Engineers.Interspersed between the ordinary chapters are snippets of the history of John Ashley and the Ashley gang, a set of notorious early-twentieth century outlaws who hunted alligators in the Everglades after Ashley fled prosecution for the murder of DeSot","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"64 1","pages":"98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85750744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}