Material culture最新文献

{"title":"Not Yet a Placeless Land: Tracking an Evolving American Geography","authors":"William McBrayer","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-3473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-3473","url":null,"abstract":"Not Yet a Placeless Land: Tracking an Evolving American Geography By Wilbur Zelinsky Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. xvii + 356pp. Seven tables, one map, notes, references, and index. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-55840-870-9; $28.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-55849-871-6.Not Yet a Placeless Land: Tracking an Evolving American Geography is the culmination of a lifetime of one scholar's efforts to analyze, problematize, and synthesize the complex geography of the United States. This book extends, alters and further deliberates Wilbur Zelinsky's earlier books such as Nation into State and Exploring the Beloved Country. It takes up the investigation of the homogenization and the seemingly contradictory diversification of the United States. Some of the book's main topics include discussions of: American statism, national expansion via geographic diffusion, sociocultural conformity, material consumption, specialized economic clustering, pleasure seeking and place-making, unpredictable place-making, regionalisms, the Generic Euro-American Region, neo-localism, convergence, divergence, globalization, and the sorting of American places.The author itemizes and explains ten cause-and-effect mechanisms or processes in the United States that influence places to be similar to or different from one another. Eight of these ten processes influence the country to become more diversified while only two of them, the diffusion of culture, and the collusion of business and government work toward uniformity. However, according to Zelinsky, it is the influential, even overbearing power of business and government together that exert the greatest influence at the national and regional scales.Zelinsky describes the United States as having on the surface become a consistently uniform and unique country due to Americans' unsettled migratory tendencies which have worked as an overall cultural leveler. Because of this, the United States has developed a large central region which Zelinsky calls, \"the Generic Euro-American Culture Region\" (GEAR), where American culture is generally the most homogenous and uniform (p. 263). He characterizes GEAR as observable on a large scale over large portions of the country.On a smaller scale, Zelinsky says that contemporary American geography is one with communities split apart by municipal codes and subdivision codes which reflect the preferences of some of its residents who want to maintain distances between themselves and others who do not share similar standards and visions for their neighborhood. Zelinsky keenly points out that:At a more intimate scale and to a degree unparalleled in the past, Americans have been sorting themselves out in space in terms of class and income...age, political ideology, religious orientation, leisure pastimes, and cultural appetites in addition to whatever residential racial/ethnic segregation may still prevail (p. 79).Zelinsky believes that Americans have reacted to their perception of placelessnes","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"41 1","pages":"63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74444832","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":"A Landscape History of New England","authors":"C. Wade","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-5878","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-5878","url":null,"abstract":"A Landscape History of New England Edited by Blake Harrison and Richard W. Judd Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. xii + 413pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-262-01640-7.A Landscape History of New England, an anthology edited by geographer Blake Harrison and historian Richard W. Judd, offers a welcome contribution to the study of New England and to the American landscape. Harrison and Judd assemble an eclectic group of scholars, both new and established, from a range of disciplines into a volume reminiscent of Michael Conzen's The Making of the American Landscape (2010), but with a specific regional focus. The book is very visual, as one should expect studies of landscapes to be, with lots of photos, maps, and figures that add much to the engaging prose by its authors. Readers of Material Culture and cultural landscape enthusiasts from most any discipline in the social sciences and humanities should find A Landscape History of New England to be a valuable contribution.The book is notably the first of its kind for the region, examining New England as a whole, with its goals to: 1) provide an historical overview of landscape change and perception from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries; 2) introduce the field and methods of landscape histories from the perspectives of history, geography, American Studies, rural sociology, plus others; and 3) offer an overview and assessment of recent scholarship on land use, landscape perception, and environmental change in New England. It is divided into sections based on five themes: the influence of identity and social memory as ascribed to distinctly \"New England\" landscapes; the diversity of various groups and their impacts on New England landscapes; the interactions of land use with landscape perception and the region's economic geography; landscapes of leisure, tourism, and recreation; and the importance of landscapes to New Englanders through movements such as conservation and historic preservation. The work additionally covers the many dichotomous attributes of New England landscapes: urban-rural, coast-interior, valley-mountain, industrial-agrarian, among others, highlighting the wide geographical diversity of this relatively small region with chapters covering all of these topics. This variety highlights the breadth of topics and contexts fertile for research on New England.The chapters are all well-written and fairly compact, and each is visually rich, with photos, maps, and other illustrations throughout. I want to commend each author for writing in a way that was comprehensible to readers from different disciplines. For example, Chapter Three by forester Lloyd C. Irland or Chapter Twenty by sociologist Eric J. Krieg were presented without resorting to jargon or unfamiliar concepts that were beyond the grasp of a non-specialist, without dumbing down the material. While the volume covers an array of topics, I found Chapter Fourteen by veteran historical geographer Jose","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"10 1","pages":"66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73232348","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":"American Urban Form: A Representative History","authors":"Mihran Kazandjian","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-0487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-0487","url":null,"abstract":"American Urban Form: A Representative History By Sam Bass Warner, Jr. and Andrew H. Whittemore Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press, 2012. x + 180pp. Drawings, notes, suggested reading, and index. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-262-01721-3.American Urban Form: A Representative History by Sam Bass Warner, Jr. and Andrew H. Whittemore is the distillation of decades of study of changing urban forms into a single, compact volume. It is intended to provide a historical understanding of the American city in order to inform decision-making by concerned urban citizens as well as \"their allies,\" the term the authors use to describe planning professionals. In order to cover such an expansive topic in 150 pages, the authors have constructed a factual but fictional city called \"the City\" that is an amalgam of \"the spatial arrangements, public events, and social practices common to\" Boston, New York and Philadelphia. The volume could also serve a valuable role in the classroom as a brief but thematically complete sketch of the historical development of the \"archetypal\" American city from the 1600s to the early 2000s. Indeed, the book does an extraordinary job tying together disparate histories of social movements, economic change, political evolution, technological change, et al. using the common stage of \"the City.\" As can be imagined (and is alluded to, particularly in the later chapters), \"the City\" does not undergo the same developmental trajectory as cities in other regions of the United States. The book's chapters are chronological with each chapter describing the City in a different politico-socio-economic stage of its development. Each chapter begins with a bird's-eye view of the City at that time period drawn by Whittemore. Whittemore's line-drawings also illustrate neighborhood designs and streetscapes within the chapters.Within the book's first two chapters, which cover the City in the seventeenth century and mid-eighteenth century respectively, the authors also provide a sketch of how religious and socioeconomic tensions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe spilled over to and played out in the early American city. Students might be surprised to learn how well integrated the City was in worldwide networks of trade and knowledge. These two chapters display a back-and-forth between an elegiac and critical presentation of the colonial city. The authors certainly discuss the brutal treatment of Native Americans and African slaves as well as many of the lower-class Europeans who, as indentured servants, were not much better off than slaves. In fact, barely-beneath-the-surface socio-economic conflict is a persistent theme of the book. Interspersed within these gloomy discussions, however, is a forward looking interpretation of early American urban forms that recognizes the already extant melting pot nature of the American city.In the wide scope with which the authors try to view the city, some of the topics covered were inevitably somewhat short-changed. The","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"3 1","pages":"77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90739994","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":"Alaska's Place in the West: From the Last Frontier to the Last Great Wilderness","authors":"K. A. Sculle","doi":"10.1525/phr.2012.81.3.468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2012.81.3.468","url":null,"abstract":"Alaska's Place in the West: From the Last Frontier to the Last Great Wilderness Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. xi + 186 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1748-7.Reviewed by Keith A. Sculle, ksculle@gmail.com, Independent Scholar, Sherman, IL 62684An environmental historian cannot necessarily be expected to treat material culture where this journal is concerned. Roxanne Willis, nonetheless, has some interesting things to say about Alaska that will engage this journal's readers interested in a precautionary tale of the pitfalls from economic developments taken without understanding Alaska's special cultural and physical circumstances. Alaska should not be subsumed in the American West.Willis, who is not from Alaska, narrates five \"stories,\" (as she types them), that this reviewer understands to be well-known to Alaskans. She accomplished her assignment in an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue. Willis tips off readers about her deepest motives in her dedication wherein she declares in part that it is \"For everyone who has fallen in love with Alaska\" (p. v).Perception of Alaska as ripe for exploitation induced the first narrative, namely, plans to introduce reindeer into western Alaska to feed the Eskimos. Presbyterian missionary, Reverend Sheldon Jackson believed the Eskimos were starving and to find a food source for them was fundamental to the acculturation program he was attempting to launch. With support from Christians who took sympathy upon the Indians throughout the United States and people of the budding Progressive movement who believed capitalism had reduced the Eskimos to their plight, Jackson introduced a reindeer herd in 1891. Over the twenty-year span through which Willis extends the reindeer introduction, development for profit eventually took the lead, but by the 1950s, nature reigned on the landscape; for overgrazing and an increase in the wolf population due to more reindeer available for food reduced the reindeer population considerably. Eventually, raising reindeer also succumbed to cultural circumstances among the Eskimos. They received reindeer herding as an economic option according to their own cultural considerations and reindeer were raised or not as they saw fit. Reindeer as an industry, Willis declares, failed because the complexities of Alaska's life and land outstripped the simplistic perceptions introduced from \"Outside.\" It never could be analogous to cattle raising in the West.Alaska has always been pressed to yield the sustenance for a large population. Russians had never penetrated farther inland than roughly 100 miles east from Norton Sound and Americans no farther than Fairbanks enticed by the short-lived gold rush. If the American investment in its purchase a third of a century earlier were to yield profit, people would have to be drawn to live permanently in Alaska. Roosevelt's New Deal seized hold of an opportunity to develop the","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"13 1","pages":"71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76697345","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":"Twilight Rails: The Final Era of Railroad Building in the Midwest","authors":"K. Porter","doi":"10.1353/mhr.2011.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mhr.2011.0000","url":null,"abstract":"By H. Roger GrantMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. xiv + 296 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8166-6562-4.Reviewed by Kimberly K. Porter, kimberly.porter@und.edu, Department of History, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND 58202While reading H. Roger Grant's Twilight Rails: The Final Era of Railroad Building in the Midwest, I found myself not only deeply engaged in the words of this Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Professor of History at Clemson (South Carolina) University, but also referring to the plentiful pictures to better understand the form of rail lines, motive power, cars and communities to which he pointed. What was most surprising to me as I read, however, was the frequency with which the children's story of \"The Little Engine that Could\" kept drifting into my mind. More on that particular subject will follow.Grant, perhaps the foremost scholar of historic railroads working today, has written extensively on the transformative impact of the steel steed over the course of his career. Readers may (and should) be familiar with some of his previous works, particularly Erie Lackawanna: The Death of an American Railroad, 19381992 (1996), \"Follow the Flag\": A History of the Wabash Railroad Company (2004), and The North Western: A History of the Chicago & North Western Railway System (1996). Hence, his bona fides for tackling of \"the final era of railroad building in the Midwest\" are substantial.While some may find points to quibble with regarding the definitions of \"the Midwest\" or the \"final era,\" they would be stretching their own credentials in order to make the obligatory illustration of a \"critical\" review. Rather, the discerning reader will find much to praise in Grant's judicious rendering of eight late entries on the rural railroad scene: the Akron, Canton & Youngstown Railroad (Ohio), the Detroit, Bay City & Western Railroad and Port Huron & Detroit Railroad (Michigan), the Electric Short Line Railway and Minnesota Western Railroad, the Ettrick and Northern Railroad (Wisconsin), the Creston, Winterset and Des Moines Railroad (Iowa), the Illinois, Iowa & Minnesota Railway and the Chicago, Milwaukee & Gary Railroad, the St. Joseph Valley Railway (Indiana), and the Missouri, Arkansas & Gulf Railway.Each of the railways under consideration came into existence rather late in the road-building era, and each was heralded by their builders and their boomers as a symbol of a prosperous and bright future for their communities. And while one might most naturally think of the transportation of human cargo, for the vast majority of the lines (and their fans), the ultimate goal was the economical transport of products, both into and out of a community. For example, southern Iowans dreamed of easy access to markets with their corn, wheat, and beef; Ohioans saw the railroad as a way to less expensively market their quarried goods and clay products; and residents of the Ozarks totaled aloud the pros","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"6 1","pages":"61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89506100","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 Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny","authors":"Andrea Truitt","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-0217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-0217","url":null,"abstract":"The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny By Dylan Trigg Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012. xxxi + 347pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. $69.95 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-8214-1975-5; $55.95 (electronic), ISBN 978-0-8214-4404-7.In The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny, Dylan Trigg focuses his attention on the strange and incongruous ways in which body and cognition respond to the environment to create and remember place, defined as \"lived spatiality\" and as an expression of \"being-in-the-world\" (p. 4). Trigg works with the question of the strangeness of place in varying types of memory (everyday, transitional, and traumatic) and at various scales (individual and group), ending with an analysis of traumatic identity and places, which do not conform to an easily rendered correlation of place, identity, memory, and time. As such, he divides into three two-chapter sections: 1) memory and imagination, 2) materiality and the flesh, and 3) trauma and spectrality.In the Preface and Introduction, the author clearly lays out the book's organization, method, and arguments, as the memory of place is one way in which we define our personal identity. The use of phenomenology aids in the analysis of \"placemaking,\" albeit on an intimate and singular scale, because of its ability to demonstrate that common places and experiences become strange to us again. As past and present experiences retranslate memory and place, they form a new and different experience of that place. The way that we experience place in the present is never the same experience as that had in the past, and they are always at odds. Trigg emphasizes the role that embodied experience plays in forming identity, place, and memory. The body's primal ability to interact with specific places at specific times makes it the origin and nexus of all orientation in which we engage to understand ourselves and make place, this not always being an easy process.To make sense of the strangeness experienced by the body in its relationship to the memory of place, Trigg invokes the Freudian term \"uncanny,\" or the \"disturbing familiarity\" experienced in certain places that lead to a disconnected experience between bodily and mental understanding (p. 25, 27). In the exploration of the uncanniness of place, the author engages with the texts of a number of important figures of phenomenology, including Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Edward Casey, and of course, Sigmund Freud, synthesizing their work and moving beyond them to understand embodied experience, personal identity, and traumatic experiences. Contextualizing his work is at times a tedious affair, especially in the Introduction, where the long passages quoted from Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty do not always illuminate Trigg's points as well as his own explanations. However, he does provide summations throughout the text at the ends of sections and chapters, making his argument e","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"116 1","pages":"82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79209522","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":"Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power and Working-Class Communities","authors":"T. Rumney","doi":"10.1525/phr.2012.81.2.309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2012.81.2.309","url":null,"abstract":"Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power and Working-Class Communities By Oliver J. Dinius andAngeL· Ver gar a, Editors Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. xi + 241 pp. Map, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8203-3329-8, $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8203-3682-4.Oliver Dinius and Angela Vergara have offered an edited volume on \"company towns\" that presents a quite different and very comparative format, content, and series of analyses about a truly important and interesting topic. This comparative approach uses original essays on company towns in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina that examine several differing industries in mining, agriculture, and manufacturing over varied time frames from the middle of the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, and that had an almost bemusing array of different results, successes, and failures as both business ventures and as social communities. While the existing literature about company towns is extensive and complex, the contents of this volume travel a long way towards a more detailed and comparative understanding of this phenomenon.Three macro-regions were selected for examination herein: Latin America, the United States, and Canada. Each essay studies selected company towns from vigorously different points of view. Andrew Herod sets the stage for these comparative studies with an extensive and thorough general presentation on concepts, interpretations, and understandings of many of the basic components and motives for company towns. While the economic characters of such communities might be the more obvious foci for study, Herod also forcefully presents a large set of social, political, and even psychological motives for the creation and maintenance of company towns. He calls such communities as much \"social engineering through spatial engineering\" as simply practical means of attracting and holding work forces in company towns that often were located in isolated localities.Aurora Gomez-Galvarriato examines how company towns (based on textile manufacturing) evolved into union towns during the tumultuous times of the Mexican Revolution. Fernando Teixeira da Silva, studying the Brazilian port city of Santos, presents the idea that Santos was essentially an economic creation of its port functions and the dominating businesses and labor force clashes of that main type of business. He also confirms a point of Herod; that company towns do not have to be located in isolation to function as company towns. Elizabeth Esch chronicles the conception, establishment, development, and ultimate failure of Henry Ford's \"Fordlandia\" communities in the semi-tropics of Brazil. Ford's settlement/plantations failed not only because of mistakes in growing the wrong type of rubber, but also persisted in misguided, and stubborn attempts at overwhelming social engineering. Ford managed to produce very little rubber for his cars, and losttens of millions of","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"165 1","pages":"70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76899981","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":"Habits of the Heartland: Small-Town Life in Modern America","authors":"K. Roe","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-4190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-4190","url":null,"abstract":"Habits of the Heartland: Small-town Life in Modern America By Lyn C. Macgregor Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. ? + 270 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-4836-2; $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8014-7643-3.This is a very readable, first hand account of the makeup of community in the small town of Viroqua, Wisconsin, written by a sociologist who lived there for two years, starting in 2001. Through personal interactions with many people and social elements of the town, the author identifies three distinct community groups that exist in and around the area. Statements from casual encounters and visits with people make the text come alive, and give the reader a real sense of everyday life in a small Midwest town. The work is not a history or nostalgic look at rural communities but rather focuses on the contemporary state of affairs. As the author suggests, her observations present a snapshot in time; this town, like others is always changing.The book is also a useful view of how a small town succeeds, avoiding decline in modern day mega commerce. For Viroqua the arrival of Walmart was a wake-up call for action to keep the downtown alive. The federal and state Main Street Program of the 1990s offered a positive incentive for the town to remain economically viable.Viroqua is not a \"typical\" small town, nor even small in comparison to the thousands of rural towns that never grew beyond a 500 population, and have lost most or all their businesses in modern times. The history of Viroqua as a county seat, location of a private elementary school, and early efforts to bring in industry, make the town special rather than ordinary. That was part of the reason the author chose to study it. Regardless of its unique character, the town and social groups that make it share many similarities with other rural communities of the Midwest.Students of material culture will appreciate the perspective outlined here. As the author points out, the community is as much a part of the material culture of a place as are its buildings and artifacts. One needs to have some knowledge of the people and social groups that comprise it to better understand the built landscape they created or use. The book offers us the insights to do that.Emphasis throughout the book is on the personal experiences and observations of the author, rather than on social theories used to explain what community is. Instead, as the author states, her purpose was to understand how community is made, while remaining \"agnostic\" about what it is. Rather than trying to fit the community into existing theories she tests their current validity and whether they apply to Viroqua.The book is a good introduction to rural, small town life, the positive and negative interactions of residents living there and what separates the social groups and what draws them together. It is not a history of the area but rather a glimpse of contemporary society and the community it creates or lives w","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"66 1","pages":"66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90666567","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":"Art of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Visual History","authors":"A. Chan","doi":"10.5860/choice.46-1871","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.46-1871","url":null,"abstract":"Art of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Visual History By Richard Haw New York: Routledge. 2008. Viii+280pp. Acknowledgements, Prologue, Notes, and Index. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN10:0-415-95386-3 & ISBN13:978-0-415-95386-3.As the title suggests, Art of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Visual History is a pictorial presentation of the legendary Brooklyn Bridge from a historical perspective. Over 250 pictures within the book depict the Brooklyn Bridge from its primitive drafts up to the current period. The author, Richard Haw, who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, also penned a previous book on the Brooklyn Bridge, The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History (2005). As an engaging story teller, he presents the Brooklyn Bridge as more than an architectural and engineering marvel; he treats it as a cultural and artistic symbol witnessing to changing times since its opening.This book consists of six chapters and a prologue. Their headings and descriptions are: Prologue: Crank, Crackpot, and Creative Genius: Plans to Bridge the East River (1800-1867); Chapter 1, Construction, Completion, and Panic (1867-1883); Chapter 2, Spectacle and Show (1883-1911); Chapter 3, Modernism Takes Command (1912-1929); Chapter 4, Depression and Recovery (1929-1945); Chapter 5, Evolution and Explosion (1946-1982); Chapter 6, Commemoration and the Contemporary Era (1983-2008).Reading through this book, one appreciates not only the labors and efforts of all involved in making this bridge a reality, but is also amazed at the thoughts provoked by this spectacular engineering accomplishment. Haw gathers feelings and expressions from a wide spectrum of people, including builders, painters, poets, artists, jumpers, and joggers. Those who study this book thoroughly will learn the unique eras it has passed since its completion and the perceptions of the bridge during different times by people from different backgrounds. For instance, Haw observes that in the 1930s, artists and writers referred to the Brooklyn Bridge as an icon of national crisis, not national dream. He writes,In the visual arts, Yung Gee imagined the bridge as a site of death [in an oil painting on canvas]. In Wheeh: Industrial New York (1932), the bridge - its towers human bones and its cable sinew - exists in a garish, almost post-apocalyptic, landscape beneath menacing figures circle the scene armed with mallets. At the center of the painting, a young Asian male enacts a depression ritual: jumping to his death (Haw 2008, 156).If a picture is worth a thousand stories, then this book is an illustrative, historical mini-encyclopedia of the Brooklyn Bridge. The images of the Brooklyn Bridge collected in this book come from various media. …","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"23 1","pages":"61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84863235","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":"An Extensive Republic: Print Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840","authors":"Mark G. Spencer","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-3588","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-3588","url":null,"abstract":"An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 Edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley Chapel Hill: Published in Association with the American Antiquarian Society by The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. xix + 697pp. Figures, tables, graphs, notes, index. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3339-1The study of the history of ideas has benefited in recent years and in important ways, from an increased attention directed to material culture aspects of the intellectual past. To our understanding of the impact in limited circles of great thinkers and their thoughts, we have added much. For instance, we now have a better appreciation of the roles played by lesser-known figures including those involved at various points in the production and dissemination of ideas in their printed form. The volume under review here adds to this trend in no small way. An Extensive Republic is volume two in \"A History of the Book in America,\" a series whose general editor is David D. Hall. The last of the five volumes to be published, the series - which began with The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, and concludes with the story of The Enduring Book, 1945-1995- is now complete. Edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, the volume comprises 12 chapters arranged in six sections. Several of the book's chapters are co-authored and others are divided into parts; there are 32 contributors in all. While this is a reference book, taken together the various contributions also constitute a narrative.The central plot of the story told here is the interplay between print culture and the nation's expanding population and geography. As Robert A. Gross writes in his general introduction, \"Struggling to serve these teeming numbers scattered across avast terrain were the personnel and institutions of print - printers, binders, type founders, papermakers, manufactures of presses and stereotype plates, booksellers, editors, authors, illustrators, engravers, proof-readers, postboys, and others - whose innovations on colonial practice and aspirations to meet the demands of a rising nation form the leitmotifs of an extensive republic\" (p. 1). As this passage hints, the volume is one with much to offer those whose interests encompass material culture. Sadly, a short review such as this can not do justice to such a massive undertaking. By sketching the book's dimensions and basic contents, however, one might hope to provide a sense of why readers of Material Culture should look closer.Section I. A Republic in Print: Ideologies and Institutions: In Chapter 1, \"The Revolution's Legacy for the History of the Book,\" Richard D. Brown argues that from \"the struggle for independence and the creation of the republic sprang unanticipated changes in how Americans produced, disseminated, and employed the printed word\" (p. 58). Not least of these was a general \"expansion of communications\" (p. 60) which created \"the material, political, and cultural bases for opening the ","PeriodicalId":81941,"journal":{"name":"Material culture","volume":"37 9 1","pages":"95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80204050","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}