Cultural History and the Material(s)

Turn
Harvey Green, Northeastern University

More than a decade into the twenty-first century, the parameters and
paradigms of cultural history, while clearer than a generation ago, are
still shifting as we examine them. A generation removed from the
publication of The New Cultural History (1989), Reading Material Culture
(1990) and, more recently, Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999), many
historians recognize the cultural turn as an established redirection in
historical methodology. Copies of these books sit on their bookshelves,
having achieved the status of venerable sources, full of marginal
notations, while slowly acquiring the patina of browned pages and
tattered covers. Material culture-based history, however, seems a recent
and perhaps fleeting phenomenon, the flowering of an exotic annual
plant in history’s otherwise hardy perennial garden of the written word.
In this article I argue that there is both a material culture element to
the ‘cultural turn’, and, to a lesser extent, a material(s) ‘turn’. After
defining material culture, I will demonstrate that the study of things
and their relationship to human history has in fact deeper roots than
recent methodological developments might suggest, visible only if we
excavate in a broader area of disciplinary ground. I then highlight
important recent works that suggest such a turn is underway and
conclude with a brief analysis of works directed at examining specific
materials in history.
Material culture – the study of the made and built world – includes
academic and vernacular architecture, the ordinary artefacts of human
and animal history, the history of the natural and altered landscape,
the interactions between humans and flora and fauna, photography
and visual material from mass media, works of art, and the artefacts of
technology. Material culture challenges the historian to discover the

Cultural History 1.1 (2012): 61–82

DOI: 10.3366/cult.2012.0006
# Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/cult

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often unspoken mental and technical processes by which artefacts

attained their appearance and form as well as the ways artefacts
embody the beliefs and values of those who made and used them.
This evidence is challenging because it usually involves several
academic disciplines, among them art history, archaeology,
anthropology, folklore, and architectural history. In addition,
extricating meanings from artefacts also sometimes relies on
speculations that discomfort analysts more accustomed to the
empiricism of the social sciences. Finally, material culture-based
history is tainted by the enormous number of popular books and
articles written by amateurs whose work is usually devoid of
documentation. But before dismissing artefacts as evidence, we
should remember that, for most of the peoples of the past, the only
evidence of we have are material remains and traces on the landscape.
Finally, the limitations of material culture apply as well to words, which
are only as accurate as human perception and the abilities and
objectivity of those who wrote them. In the end, benefits of material
culture-based history have and will outweigh its challenges, if we are
careful to take the measure of our sources.

A Beginning in the Borders

Classical artefacts and architecture certainly informed the works of
Renaissance and Early Modern scholars, artists and architects. In the
more immediate past Sir Walter Scott’s Border Antiquities of England
and Scotland (1813–15) provides an example of how field research
enriched a new literary form – historical fiction.1 In this large two-
volume work, Scott described the structures or remains of castles and
ecclesiastical buildings, and noted other material tracings of the
Scottish Borders. While much of the dramatic power and popular
success of his tales and poetry lay in narratives that showcased the
virtues and vices of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances,
some of it lay in the verisimilitude he created by his attention to
material detail.2
Scott was not alone in his devotion to fieldwork and careful
description of landscape and material reality. By the mid-nineteenth
century collectors of folk tales, songs, and ballads as well as other non-
fiction writers followed his lead in their devotion to fieldwork and
careful description of the material world. In the United States the
engraver Benson Lossing (1813–91) did fieldwork throughout the
United States and Canada for his Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution
(1850–52). In Finland, Elias Lönnrot (1802–84) collected tales and
songs in the late 1820s and early 1830s, and published Finland’s epic

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poem, the Kalevala, in 1835. In Norway Jørgen Moe (1813–82) and

Christen Asbjørnsen (1812–85) collected similar materials in the
1830s.3 Such activities continued in Britain and in continental Europe
for the remainder of the nineteenth century, especially in regions and
among ethnic groups taken with Romantic nationalist movements.
Folk and traditional songs inspired a multitude of classically trained
and inclined composers as well.4
Influenced by the work of the Prussian poet and philosopher
Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), later nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century American sociologists, missionaries, and folklorists
collected traditional songs of the Appalachian peoples whom they
believed to be nearly unchanged from their eighteenth-century
Scots-Irish forbears.5 Anthropologists similarly documented Native
American culture, and elites ‘discovered’, in Appalachian and
Native American peoples and their crafts, specimens of cultures they
thought were vanishing.6 In Canada, Helen Creighton, for example,
collected traditional songs and stories of Nova Scotians in the late
1920s.7
Many of the collections that resulted from this fieldwork became
the foundation of national, local, college, and university museums
established at the turn of the century. In Sweden, Artur Hazelius
(1833–1901) founded Skansen in 1891. An open-air museum,
Skansen’s village-like setting included representative buildings and
entire farmsteads moved to Stockholm from the Swedish and
Norwegian countryside. In Finland, ethnologist Axel O. Heikel was
instrumental in the founding of the Finnish folk life museum,
Seurasaari, in 1909. Outdoor museums proliferated in the United
States after 1920, when Henry Ford began to collect American
buildings and artefacts for his museum and ‘village’ in Dearborn,
Michigan, and the Rockefeller family commenced their project to
restore Williamsburg, Virginia. These and other museums conducted
significant research and published important works while academic
historians in the main looked the other way.8
The advent of these museums coincided with the increasing
professionalization among scholars that occurred at the end of the
nineteenth century. Historians, folklorists, and anthropologists
established professional societies, founded journals, and occupied
positions in both universities and national governments.9 In the
United States, for example, the Bureau of Ethnology (established in
1879) employed several anthropologists, published 48 illustrated Annual
Reports documenting Native American artefacts and cultural practices
between 1881 and 1931 and 200 Bulletins between 1887 and 1971.

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Similar state-sponsored and private collecting and preservation activities

occurred throughout Europe and Great Britain.10

Politics and Professionalism

Unfortunately, the flowering of academic disciplinary
professionalization in the United States splintered what had been a
multidisciplinary academic effort. Academically trained historians
viewed the study of ‘the folk’ as nostalgic or romantic anti-
modernism, and studies of ‘primitive’ societies, such as the Native
Peoples of the Southwest, as less important than the history of literate
Euro-Americans.11 Perhaps historians were uncomfortable with the
political underpinnings of work that celebrated ordinary people,
whom many elites at the turn of the century viewed as threats to their
culture. As academic historians came to define themselves as archival
researchers first (and text as the only reliable evidence), the study of
material culture was left to classicists (who were thought to have
no choice, given the paucity of written records from that era),
anthropologists, popular history writers, and collectors.12
In the United States at the turn of the century the politics
of professional history mattered at least as much as disciplinary
definition and professional identity. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants
fretted about the massive immigration of Catholics from Southern and
Eastern Europe, Eastern and Greek Orthodox Christians, and Jews.
The immigrants’ strong ethnic identity and the increasing violence of
labour-management clashes stoked the fires of nativism. American
elites also believed that they bore some of the blame for their perilous
condition. They were convinced that they had declined from the
healthy generations that founded, built, and expanded the Republic,
and that the newer immigrants were more robust than were they.
They began crusades to restrict immigration, encourage greater
participation in sport and exercise, improve diet, and advance
temperance so that they might enhance and rebuild the physical
and mental strength of those who had long ago left or never were part
of the healthier environment of the farm and frontier.13
Historians and Americans in general accepted with little question
the central hypothesis of Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 paper, ‘The
Significance of the Frontier in American History’: that is, the
democratic institutions of American history were a result of settlers’
experience on the western edge of civilization, what Turner termed the
‘frontier line’. Careful readers recognized immediately that Turner’s
defining experience was a thing of the past, one that did not include
new immigrants, who found jobs and fellow countrymen in the cities.

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Turner concluded his essay with the discomforting observation that an

age had ended in the history of the United States. He offered no
comforting prediction for the future.14
Viewed in isolation from European cultural history, this seems
paradoxical – the simultaneous hardening of class identity among
elites and celebration of a borderlands folk culture. In both the United
States and Europe, the Romantic Nationalist narrative of founding
giants and simple, virtuous citizens became the stuff of history in
popular culture, and the academic outsider’s province – the collector’s
obsession, the composer’s inspiration, and the novelist’s quest for
verisimilitude, and much more popular than academics’ ‘scientific’
work.15 In the United States, it allowed male academic historians – and
nearly all were male – to separate themselves professionally from the
amateurs of both sexes, while allowing them to participate socially in
the aesthetics and romance of antiques in museums and ‘colonial
revival’ physical settings.16 Material culture became goods to be
collected and savoured, and in some cases therapeutic agents that
provided, as the Arts and Crafts Movement magazine The Craftsman put
it, ‘old-time quiet in a breathless age’.17 In this academic and political
environment, material culture became an unacceptable source for
serious historians.
The Craftsman validated material culture as a source, if only as part of
a bourgeois response to industrialism and its discontents. Publisher
Gustav Stickley argued that the hand-made product was superior to the
factory-made, and that handwork allowed workers more creative power.
The magazine regularly contained articles on American Indian folk
life, Japanese crafts, and the products and philosophies of art and craft
groups in England, the United States, and Europe. While the Arts and
Crafts Movement had little direct impact on the working class – they
could neither afford the goods nor leave their industrial jobs for craft
societies – it did resonate with ‘nervous’ and harried North American
and European elites and the bourgeoisie. They established craft and
amateur arts schools, such as the Mechanics Institute of Rochester,
New York, and supported small colonies of like-minded artists and
craftsmen, such as Stickley’s Craftsman Workshops (1900), Roycroft
(1895), Byrdcliffe (1902) and Elverhoj (1913) in New York State,
and larger commercial concerns such as the Rookwood Pottery of
Cincinnati, Ohio (1880). The latter were modelled after organizations
in England, such as the Art Workers’ Guild (1884), William Morris and
Company (1885), and C. R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft (1888) as
well as those on the Continent, such as Den norske Husflidsforening
(Norwegian Society for Home Industry, 1891), Dresdner Werkstätten

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für Handwerkskunst (Dresden Workshops for Handicraft, 1897),

Föreningen Svenska Hemslöjd (Swedish Handicraft Society, 1899),
Towarzystwo Polska Sztuka Stosowana (Polish Applied Art Society,
1901), and Gödöllö Artists’ Colony (Hungary, 1902). Influenced by
these organizations, craft training became part of secondary education,
sometimes as vocational training and sometimes as part of a more
general art, recreational, and therapeutic movement.18

A Farewell to History
In the middle decades of the twentieth century, material culture
studies continued apace in fields other than academic history.
Classicists, historians of Medieval and Early Modern Europe, and
folklorists continued their multidisciplinary work. In England, W. G.
Hoskins’ (1908–92) analyses of landscape use and alteration
influenced a generation of agricultural and economic historians.19
His field research on vernacular architecture in the Midlands and East
Anglia revealed a pattern of separated entry spaces in houses in densely
settled areas of East Anglia, and a pattern of unmediated entry into
private spaces in sparsely settled Midlands-areas houses. He theorized
that these spatial organizations corresponded to the desire to maintain
privacy. Later scholars have questioned some of Hoskins’ conclusions,
but his research and analysis were nonetheless critical early steps in
the study of vernacular architecture.20 Writing later in the twentieth
century, John B. Jackson, John Stilgoe, and D. W. Meinig, among
others, refined these methods in a series of brilliant and original
works.21
Vernacular architecture and landscape studies were not part of
the canon of architectural history. But architectural historians’
works and methods provided vital information about the nature
and history of academic and formal buildings and styles and of
architect-patron relations, and taught people how to examine and
carefully describe a building. The study of ordinary houses, barns
and outbuildings usually fell to those in other disciplines, especially
folklore. This was usually included in the more expansive subject of
folk life, which incorporated research not only about long-surviving
songs, tales, and rituals, but also about housing, foodways, religious
practices, crafts, and the non-academic plastic and representational
arts. The influence of cultural and structural anthropology is evident
in the method and thematic organization of much of the work in
this field.
Because vernacular architecture seldom has the formal
documentation or planning of academic architecture, and is often

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designed and built by the same people, it poses potential problems for
the historian. In Hearth and Home: Preserving a People’s Culture (1982),
George McDaniel applied the methods of formal architectural history
to a tenant farmer’s cabin in rural Maryland. With rigorous archival
research and oral history, he reconstructed the domestic culture of
people whose history was only dimly known. Dell Upton’s Holy Things
and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (1997) employs
performance theory and formal architectural history to reveal not only
a portrait of the social and cultural life of both the elites and ordinary
Virginians, but also the manner in which the groups interacted. The
diffusion of vernacular forms across time and space has enabled
historians to substantiate theories of migrating peoples and cultures.
Terry Jordan and Matti Kaups studied the diffusion of the log cabin
in The American Backwoods Frontier (1989), locating the genesis of this
type of linked, notched structure in the Savo region of Finland.22
Vernacular architecture scholars have been actively documenting such
architecture since the 1960s, and there are several working groups,
journals, and newsletters, including the Vernacular Architectural Forum in
the United States and the Vernacular Architectural Group in Great
Britain.
One of common threads in many of these works is the influence of
phenomenology – and particularly Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of
Space (1958). Bachelard sought to reorient formal architectural history,
from analysis of stylistic origins, description and variation to an
examination of the relationships between people and buildings,
furnishings, and spaces. His work on nests, the miniature, corners,
drawers, chests, and wardrobes opened new possibilities for those
studying the material world, though the speculative nature of the
enterprise raised questions for historians more comfortable with
empirical methods.23
Henry Glassie’s Folk Housing in Middle Virginia (1975), based on
extensive fieldwork in two rural Virginia counties, analyzed unwritten
building traditions and rules. His complex tables and charts of
influences and practices and detailed drawings provided a set of
explanations based on structural anthropology and linguistic theory.
For Glassie, buildings represented the builder’s mental systems,
unwritten but nonetheless discernible through fieldwork, data
collection, and cross-disciplinary methods.24
Using anthropology to study material culture is hardly new. The
term ‘material culture’ has nineteenth-century roots in the work of
anthropologists who found evidence of native peoples’ belief systems
represented on the surface and in the processes of thinking about,

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making, and using artefacts. By analyzing objects and the materials,

methods, and the tools to make them they began the process of
understanding some of the elements of those cultures, many of which
were utterly alien to those of the West.

Consumers and Culture

In the latter decades of the twentieth century, many scholars of
material culture joined cultural historians in bringing the methods and
interpretations of semiotics, post-structuralism and deconstruction
to their analyses.25 Many of these late-century studies focus on
the consumers of material culture, endeavouring to unlock the
unspoken and unwritten belief systems and intellectual history of
mass societies. But this temporal convergence of material culture
studies and history’s cultural turn had little convergence in practice.26
Neither The New Cultural History nor Reading Material Culture pay
attention to material culture. The former focuses on written sources
and the latter on theoretical comparisons and disputes involved in
confronting the material world. This may be a result of the cultural
turn’s emphasis on power relationships and shifts and the tendency to
regard ordinary people as an undifferentiated mass that is essentially
powerless.
Some consumer culture analyses are concerned with the nature
and origins of the ‘consumer revolution’ that many historians believe
began in the later eighteenth century; others with the ways that
consuming goods reflected or altered the owners’ belief systems. Both
shifted the attention of some historians to the ‘world of goods’. Two
early studies of the consumer revolution, Grant McCracken’s Culture
and Consumption (1988), and Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and
J. H. Plumb’s, The Birth of a Consumer Society (1982), focused on
commodities to reveal the mentalité of consumers, rather than that of
the makers. These and subsequent works by, for example, Timothy
Breen and Kariann Yokota, have enlarged our understanding of the
ways in which consumption patterns and political and cultural history
blend and interact.27
In Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England
Culture, Robert Blair St. George investigates a multitude of material
cultural forms to discover hitherto unknown power relationships in the
emerging capitalist order in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
He finds links between the migration patterns of artisans to New
England, episodic mass violence, housing, portraiture, and landscape
modification to reveal both the power that elites commanded and the
resentment they engendered. He shows how theatricality and the

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conventions of self-presentation in portraiture and clothing worked to

isolate and anger the working classes, their rage often taking the form
of attacks on buildings and, symbolically, their occupants. The title and
subtitle offer clues to St. George’s intellectual lineage and method –
semiotics and Aristotle’s Poetics – but his analysis is also influenced by
thinkers such as Roger Chartier, Simon Schama, Michel de Certeau,
and Mary Douglas.28
A similarly deft analysis of the material culture of the United States
is Kenneth Ames’ Death in the Dining Room & Other Tales of Victorian
Culture (1992).29 Ames reached across art history, ergonomics, social
and cultural history, and the history of technology to unpack the
meanings embedded in hall stands, sideboards, paintings, popular
prints, photographs, needlework wall decorations, typographic
design, foodways, parlour organs, and rocking chairs. Death in the
Dining Room was a path-breaking work that for many years stayed
under the radar of most historians, perhaps because it was a work of
radically different method and interpretive stance. It is a remarkable
example of deep research and horizontal thinking, and remains
the single best work on the late nineteenth-century culture of the
United States.

Words, Things, Arguments

When and if historians had engaged material culture, it was usually to
discuss the methodological issues involved in the nature of the
evidence – words versus things. These debates date back to as early as
1964, when John Kouwenhoven’s ‘American Studies: Words or Things’
first appeared.30 In the academy this discussion has seldom gone
beyond the original dichotomy. Those who pushed beyond the obvious
tended to be scholars working in history, but not in history departments.
In Death in the Dining Room, Ames, who was trained as an art historian,
summarized his position this way:

My argument is not that material culture is superior to other ways of

knowing, but that it is different. The view of the world revealed through
material culture is not the same as that attained through words. For
that matter, the world of things and the world of words are not the
same. Things and words draw on different systems of perception and
cognition. Objects have both philogenetic and ontogenetic primacy.
The earliest humans probably used tools before they developed
coherent speech . . . Things occupy a distinctive place on the field of
human culture, providing data, advancing agendas, and supporting and
embodying assumptions often not expressed elsewhere.31

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Henry Glassie, trained as a folklorist, put it this way:

When documents accompany artefacts, it would be foolish to ignore

them, but it would be no less a mistake to assume that they say the same
things and that the documents is the more reliable source. Documents
and uninscribed artefacts want separate analysis, followed by comparison
to locate their point of complement and conflict.32

Recent methodological discussions among historians and their

colleagues in other disciplines suggest that we may be moving
beyond the usual confines of the debate. Ten years after the
publication of The New Cultural History and Reading Material Culture
the editors of Beyond the Cultural Turn were aware of the possibility
when they wrote, ‘Surely it is no accident that much exciting work by
younger scholars now focuses on material culture, one of the arenas in
which culture and social life most obviously and significantly intersect,
where culture takes concrete form and those concrete forms make
cultural codes most explicit’.33 They cite three books – Leora
Auslander’s Taste and Power (1996), Kenneth Alder’s Engineering the
Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (1997), and
Jennifer Jones’s Sexing la Mode (forthcoming in 1999, published 2004).
But it was the only reference to material culture that I found in the
book.34
In 2005 Auslander engaged the argument in ‘Beyond Words’, an
essay originally published in the American Historical Review. She sought
to ‘expand . . . the range of our canonical sources [to] . . . provide
better answers to familiar historical questions as well as change the very
nature of the questions we are able to pose and the kind of knowledge
we are able to acquire about the past’. Beginning with the work of
psychologists, psychoanalysts, and phenomenologists, she built a case
for the study of objects as ‘active agents of history . . . in their
communicative, performative, emotive, and expressive capacities’.35
Referencing Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, Karl Marx, and
Walter Benjamin, among others, she showed the ways in which other
disciplines have contributed to the historian’s method. She focused on
art historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists; I expand the core
works on material culture to include those studying vernacular
architecture, folklore, folk life, and the evolution of the landscape.
In 2009 the American Historical Review published a ‘Conversation:
Historians and the Study of Material Culture’. Participants in what had
begun as an on-line group discussion included Auslander, food
historian Amy Bentley, historian of Islam Leor Halevi, historian of

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science H. Otto Sibum, and archeologist Christopher Witmore. The

conversation confronted several methodological and practical issues.
Bentley explained the ways in which examining the gear and the
technology of baby food complements and expands the information
she obtained from published industrial and consumer sources.
Sibum demonstrated that he could neither replicate James Joule’s
experiments nor get his results, even when using identical instruments
and replicating visual representations of the experiments made in
Joule’s time. He discovered that written sources (research notebooks
and diaries) were meant for the expert who already possessed working
knowledge. Auslander asserted that her training as a cabinetmaker ‘was
as essential to my grasp on the subject as all of the archival, library, and
museum research I conducted’.36 Halevi observed that Auslander’s
position is shared by psychoanalysts’ and phenomenologists’ concept
of ‘universal embodiedness’, and questioned whether that enabled her
to experience cabinetmaking exactly as it had been in the past.
Auslander did not argue that she replicated the experience; rather that
her work experience provided additional ‘knowledge, skill and craft-sense
[italics original]’.37
Auslander’s work on furnishing in France and on the material culture
in the English, American, and French Revolutions demonstrates that
governments made conscious decisions to change the look of goods
and clothing because they knew the communicative – and evocative –
power of objects.38 Laurel Ulrich begins each chapter in The Age of
Homespun (2001) with an intensive analysis of an artefact, moving
outward to revise our understanding of the part women played in the
American Revolution and of Native American history in nineteenth-
century New England.39 Both she and Auslander examine the ways in
which artefacts function as both evidence and agent in the process of
defining and mythologizing history.40

The Metropole is Not the Only Pole

In Two Carpenters (2006), J. Ritchie Garrison demonstrates how
studying written records, material culture, and building processes
reveals information that mandates a substantial revision of current
theories about how cultural knowledge is processed and disseminated
over space and time.41 Garrison shows how carpenter Calvin Stearns
developed a unique interpretation of the neo-classical style in rural
Massachusetts, and how he used his own house to demonstrate his
competence to potential clients, fellow tradesmen, and neighbours.
Garrison’s discovery of the central role local builders played in the
nature and evolution of form, style, and design is a substantial revision

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of the top-down, urban-to-rural model of the transmission of ideas,

a more nuanced interpretation that illuminates the creative and
organizational skills of local craftsmen. As industrialization in the
building trades relieved carpenters of some of the labour-intensive
chores of the pre-industrial era, such as making shutters, blinds, and
window sash, they were able to devote themselves to more refined and
more skill-intensive tasks that showed their competence and increased
their business.
One of the most important themes in Garrison’s work is that
accomplished carpenters, builders, joiners, and by extension all other
expert craftsmen and women did not gain their prowess by a magical
power or ‘special gift’. The history of the Stearns family demonstrates
that they achieved their competence through years of hard work,
experimentation, and the gradual accumulation of skill. Through his
detailed analyses of floor plans and the evolution of the Stearns’s
building repertoire, Garrison showed how vernacular and academic
architecture can become windows into a complex world of
competence, power, class, and social performance, enlarging our
understanding of rural and village life at a time when most Americans
lived there.
Historical analysis grounded in material culture and the mental
processes involved in making things also has deep roots in the history
of technology.42 Works examining the processes and methods of work,
such as John Vlach’s detailed descriptions and analysis of the products
of a limestone carver and metalworker in By the Work of Their Hands:
Studies in Afro-American Folklife (1991), and those primarily concerned
with how artefacts reveal cultural change over time, such as Sarah Hill’s
Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Baskets
(1997), are important additions to the already large number of
historical works on the history of technology. An important and path-
breaking work that straddles all of the above categories is Michael
Owen Jones’ The Handmade Object and Its Maker (1975), which examines
the works of an Appalachian chair maker and the ways in which his
tempestuous life altered his methods of work and shaped his creative
energies.43
Garrison, Vlach, Hill, and Jones direct readers’ attention to the
nature of work and the interplay of competence, design, and the
materials employed in the fashioning of artefacts, and provide an
important addition to labour history. They add vital information to the
histories of labour’s struggle for better wages and working conditions,
of the demographics and migration of labour, and of working people’s
place in class and caste systems. Material culture-based studies in which

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there is an intricate description of the tools and processes of

making things provide us with new information about how people
learn, how they become competent, how they achieve mastery, how
they understand and make decisions about materials and design, how
they reject, contend with, or accept new technology, and ultimately
how work, craft, and the artefacts people make, use and treasure define
and provide meaning in their lives.

The Material and the Mentalité

In this context material culture can expand and enrich cultural
history, helping us comprehend the unspoken relationships between
work, creativity, and cultural meaning, thus providing access to new
aspects of the mentalité of individuals and cultures. In The Poetics of
Space, Gaston Bachelard suggested that an action as mundane as
polishing furniture was more than the physics of bodily movement and
friction – it was an action that revealed something of the meta-physics
of humans’ relationships to the tangible world.

And so, when a poet rubs a piece of furniture – even vicariously – when
he puts a little fragrant wax on his table with the woolen cloth that lends
warmth to everything it touches, he creates a new object; he increases the
object’s human dignity; he registers the object officially as a member of
the human household. Henri Bosco once wrote [in Le jardin d’Hyancinthe
(1944)], . . . ‘It was as though the radiance induced by magnetic rubbing
emanated from the hundred-year-old sapwood, from the very heart of
the dead tree, and spread gradually, in the form of light, over the whole
tray’.44

Physical labour, as Auslander has observed, creates a special affective

relationship between the worker, the tool, and the object, such as when a
cabinetmaker planes a board.45 The planer’s arm and leg muscles
transfer force to the plane iron’s edge; the hand measures the
smoothness of the surface. This physical and mental relationship is
not about hand work alone; guiding a machine and managing its
power in relation to the material are tests of the operator’s skill. In
woodworking, differences in grain, figure, and hardness transform a
mechanical process into a mental one, drawing upon both the routine of
experience and the novelty of the material, which in the case of wood is
always present in some degree, since no two pieces of wood are identical.
The processes of design, shaping, and making remain cognitive,
experimental and experiential skills, whether or not machinery is used.
This is not to say that the experience of working, playing, cooking,
eating, or other such activities is essential for writing about that activity.

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Attempting to even partly replicate the past may not be possible,

practical, or safe. But historians should expand their tools and methods
when plying their trade whenever possible. This might include
interviews with those who perform related or similar activities,
bearing in mind that similar is not identical and that contemporary
people operate in a vastly different world from that of the distant or
even near past. These limitations, however great, do not render the
information gained of so little help that it is not worth the time. All
forms of evidence have their drawbacks and their advantages.

A Tale of Two Approaches

Examining recent historical works grounded in material culture or
material(s) culture reveals two distinct approaches to the subject and
to artefacts or commodities. One less popular among the general
public is the deeply researched study of the uses and meanings across
time and space of one material or substance. The other approach,
usually by an author with no formal training in history, identifies a
substance as a – or even the – critical material in world history. The
former approach places the material in a historical and cultural
context, relying on models taken from anthropology and from social,
intellectual, cultural, and economic history. The latter usually relies on
a linear narrative in which much of the complexity of history is brushed
aside in favour of a heroic story of a humble substance. Often included
are tales of determined individuals who persisted in the face of elite or
bureaucratic opposition, a ‘great man’ (and, less commonly, woman)
theory of the history of ordinary things. Each approach and its
audience explain much about popular cultural needs and desires.
One of the earliest books of the first type is Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness
and Power (1985). A cultural anthropologist who focused on the
Caribbean, Mintz showed how sugar and slavery fuelled the spread of
capitalism and transformed European and American foodways,
providing a new fuel for working people and a new commodity for
empires in the making. Mintz held that the cultural importance of
sugar influenced British and American foreign policy.46 While Mintz
was not so much concerned with the actual process of making sugar, he
began with the substance and brought it to the forefront – not merely
as a commodity but as a force that altered people’s perceptions of
themselves, their society, and their world. He stood the usual model of
inquiry on its head.
The cultural history of food has deep roots in anthropology. Formal
studies of foodways often include the history of agricultural techniques
and technology, as well as the nature of beliefs linked to the growing,

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harvesting, and consuming of foodstuffs. The works of the current

generation of food historians are in the main trans-cultural and trans-
national investigations of a single food type, such as corn, spices,
chocolate, and coffee. They build upon Mintz’s model, with their focus
on the material and its influence on culture and (usually) imperial
power, and in their examination of the physical and biological
characteristics of the materials, which are often of many species.
These works are almost always interdisciplinary, dependent in varying
amounts on botany, agronomy, anthropology, and environmental,
social, and economic history. Nearly all of them link foodstuffs to
international trade and many connect the cross-cultural interactions
involved in the exchange of goods to colonialism.47
A similar starting point informs Jeffrey Meikle’s American Plastic:
A Cultural History (1995).48 Meikle examines the varieties of plastics
(celluloid, Bakelite, nylon, etc.) and analyzes the processes of
laboratory development and factory production. He describes the
debates about the utility of the products, marketing strategies, and the
social and cultural responses to plastics. Although plastics at first had
the advantages of being made in part from ‘Nature’s waste products’
and of possessing qualities of durability and disposability, the latter
ultimately became synonyms for clogged landfills, littered beaches and
ocean eddies full of trash threatening aquatic life, and products full of
dangerous chemicals that may never degrade. Bridging chemistry, art
history, aesthetics, communications theory, and social history, American
Plastic is an example of the possibilities of a cultural history of a
material that pervades contemporary life.
In Wood: Craft, Culture, History (2006), I approached the subject
material with the goal of examining its place in world cultures across
time.49 The book begins with chapters describing the way trees grow,
physical properties across the species, and species differentiation and
geographic diffusion across the globe. I then examined uses of wood in
shelter, transportation, warfare, play, music, art, cooking, heating, and
several miscellaneous uses and activities. Other topics included the
technologies and methods of harvesting and transforming wood from
trees into boards and from lumber into joined and finished products,
and wood as a raw material for shipbuilding in early modern European
and East Asian history.
Like many other natural commodities, wood has not been entirely
superseded by other materials, whether derived from nature (metals)
or wholly man-made (plastics), even though many newer materials
were technologically and economically superior to it. In spite of wood’s
disadvantages – it rots, is dimensionally unstable, burns, and rodents

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and insects eat it – people still choose to live in and with it. I argue that
they do so because wood has meaning beyond practicality – or lack of
it. It is thus a cultural material as well as a cultured material, with a long
and deep history of human affect. Its symbolic presence is embodied in
everything from the cross to the crossbow and the Stradivarius to the
baseball bat. If wood wasn’t a culturally loaded material, why is its
texture and look approximated in so many other materials, especially
plastic, which many regard as its antithesis? All of us have sat around
folding tables with a faux wood grain surface, have we not? But we are
not fooled. It is still plastic and the meeting is still a waste of time.
The second approach to the history of a material or substance – that
which isolates and elevates the substance to the status of catalyst or
determinant in local, national or world history – has an altogether
different intellectual origin. Methodologically, these works often rely
on the biographical method, tracing the ‘noble’ or ‘humble’ material
from its first human use to the moment when it becomes pivotal in
human events. Many of these studies have substantive value and
apparently are grounded in research, but most are devoid of footnotes
or endnotes. All but a few contain a partial bibliography and an index,
but what passes for the historian’s citation is the occasional abridged
reference made in the body of the text, generally with no page
numbers from the original source.50
Some of these books are extremely popular, garnering attention
in mass media and occasionally some notice in the academy, usually
in specialized fields, such as culinary and technological history. Mass
media reviews have been positive for most of them; academic reviews
more sceptical. Their popularity among the general public is in
part grounded in their triumphalist narrative/biography form. Linear
narrative’s straight lines between past and present affirm the
comforting story of progress. It simplifies the past, ignoring the
complexities, contradictions, nuances, and ironies of human
experience, and presents capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism as
the inevitable or ‘natural’ order of history’s arc.
This type of history also resonates with the general public because it
elevates an ordinary, ubiquitous material or substance to the role of a
critical factor in human history. This is a comforting determinism that
celebrates the quotidian, allowing readers to find meaning and
comfort in what was in front of them all along. It is analogous to the
Victorian romantic novel that celebrates the unsung person, toiling
and waiting to be discovered, but never too aggressive to demand
recognition. The humble spud, powerless and crying its eyes out in the
dark and damp, will one day be recognized for what it is – important.

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And so will the reader. We do not need the example of Walter Scott’s
Flora MacDonald or Jeannie Deans to inspire us; codfish or cotton will
do just fine.
These underlying messages, in all likelihood unseen by the writers,
deflect economic or social discomfiture and suspend critical thinking.
They direct attention from the iniquities of entrenched social,
economic, and political systems. Flush with examples of people who
triumph because they keep quiet and do their job, they are exactly
what a corporate power structure wants its work force to believe.

A Material(s) Turn?
But is there is a material(s) ‘turn’ in cultural history? It seems fair to say
that there is a now modest emphasis, primarily in the histories of food,
technology, and work. There is also a longer-standing attention to
material culture and material(s) in cultural history than many have
thought. Serious research and writing about material culture and
material(s) culture has been ongoing for many years, most of it outside
of the academic history. Some of this work has refocused attention on
artisans and methods of work, not to the exclusion of factory or
industrial work, but as part of an exploration of the depth of the
industrial working person’s loss and of societies that have traded
the human relationship to materials and work for the superficial acts of
consumption. The recent emphasis among some scholars of material
culture on making things or shaping materials is not a romantic paean
to ages and crafts lost; it represents a broadened opportunity
for intellectual and cultural history of those whose work and skills
seem to be miraculous and those whose work and skills seem to be
monotonous. In some small – or maybe big – way, these studies
challenge the ethos of socioeconomic systems that grind people
between the millstones of modernity.
The best scholarship in material and material(s) culture is grounded
in the exploration of the affective meanings in things and a more
extensive inquiry into the nature and meanings of work, play,
foodways, religion, comfort and the panoply of human activities.
Research in material and material(s) culture offers a new strategy to
discover more about whom we know little – as well as those about
whom we already know a considerable amount. All people have an
intellectual and cultural history, if we know how to find and
understand it. Material culture is not the magic bullet – but it is an
important part of our analytical arsenal. The history of material culture
studies shows us that this is not so much a material turn as a re-turn, a
new shaping of historical – and historians’ – consciousness with new

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tools, much like what happens when a turner applies a new gouge to a
piece of wood spinning on a lathe – new forms, new shapes, and new
possibilities emerge.

Notes
1. Scott, Walter (1813, 1815), Border Antiquities of England and Scotland (two volumes),
London: Longman & Co.
2. Among the best of the vast literature on Scott are: Dekker, George (1987), The
American Historical Romance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Brown, David
(1979), Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination, London: Routledge and Keegan
Paul; Lukács, Georg (1962), The Historical Novel, Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
3. These collectors were akin to the naturalists such as John James Audubon, William
Bartram and Per Kalm, who were at work collecting and organizing specimens of
the natural world.
4. Some examples are: Johannes Brahms (1833–97), ‘Nineteen Hungarian
Dances’; Jean Sibelius (1865–1957), ‘Finlandia’; Franz Liszt (1811–86),
‘Hungarian Rhapsodies’; Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859–1935), ‘Caucasian
Sketches’; Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936), ‘Ancient Airs and Dances’; Aleksandr
Borodin (1833–87), ‘Polovtsian Dances’; Antonin Dvořák (1841–1904), ‘Slavonic
Dances’; Charles Ives (1874–1954), ‘Three Places in New England’; Enrique
Granados (1867–1916), ‘Twelve Spanish Dances’.
5. Wilson, William A. (1973), ‘Herder, Folklore, and Romantic Nationalism’, Journal of
Popular Culture, 6:4, pp. 819–35.
6. Shapiro, Henry (1978), Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and
Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920, Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press; Whisnant, David E. (1983), All that Is Native and Fine: The
Politics of Culture in an American Region, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press; Becker, Jane (1998), Selling the Folk: Appalachia and the Construction of an
American Folk, 1930–1940, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
7. McKay, Ian (1994), The Quest for the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in
Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia, Montréal: McGill-Queens University Press, pp. 3–43.
8. Colonial Williamsburg was a leader in archaeology of early Virginia for decades
after it opened in 1935. See, for example, Hume, Ivor Noël (1979), Martin’s
Hundred, Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, and the Winterthur
Museum journal, Winterthur Portfolio.
9. In the United States, the American Historical Association was founded in 1884; the
American Folklore Society in 1888; the American Anthropology Association in
1902.
10. For a contemporary example of these activities, see Arminjon, Catherine and Nicole
Blondel (2002), Objets: Civils, Domestiques, Paris: Monum, Éditions du patrimoine.
11. Lears, T. J. Jackson (1981), No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of
American Culture, 1880–1920, New York: Pantheon.
12. Higham, John (1965), History: Professional Scholarship in America, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, pp. 1–26, 92–103, 147–70; Novick, Peter (1988), That
Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alice Morse Earle (1851–1911) wrote
seventeen books on everyday life in early America, much of it based on material

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culture. Henry Chapman Mercer (1856–1930) assembled a huge collection of

American material culture, established a museum, the Fonthill Pottery, and wrote
The Hill-Caves of Yucatan (1895) and Ancient Carpenters’ Tools (1929). George Gustav
Heye (1874–1957) opened the Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian
in 1922 in New York City.
13. See, for example, Ellis, John (1884), The Deterioration of the Puritan Stock and Its
Causes, New York: John Ellis; Grant, Madison (1916), The Passing of the Great Race,
New York: Scribner’s.
14. Turner began his essay on a sombre note – that the 1890 Federal Census indicated
that the supply of free land in the United States was ‘exhausted’. Turner, Frederick
Jackson (1920), ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, in Turner,
The Frontier in American History, New York: Henry Holt and Co., pp. 1–38. On the
‘exhaustion’ of the availability of free land that predates Turner’s essay, see Gill,
Thomas P. (1886), ‘Landlordism in America’, North American Review, 142, pp. 52–67.
15. See Hobsbawm, Edward and Terence Ranger (eds) (1983), The Invention of
Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Facos, Michelle (1998),
Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Art of the 1890s, Berkeley: University
of California Press; National Museum of Stockholm (1995), Nordiskt Sekelskifte (The
Light of the North), Stockholm: National Museum.
16. Greenfield, Briann G. (2009), Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century
New England, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press; Stillinger, Elizabeth,
The Antiquers, New York: Alfred A. Knopf; Williams, Susan R. (forthcoming), ‘The
Mother of American Material Culture’, Alice Morse Earle and the History of American
Domestic Life, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, Chapter 5.
17. [Stickley, Gustav] (1904), The Craftsman, December, p. 315. See also Green, Harvey
(1986), Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society, 1830–1940, New
York: Pantheon, pp. 259–82.
18. See, for example, Kaplan, Wendy (2004), The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and
America: Design for the Modern World 1880–1920, London: Thames and Hudson.
Societies, workshops, and school programs were also organized in Finland,
Belgium, Holland, France, Denmark, Austria, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand.
19. Hoskins, William George (1963), Provincial England: Essays in Social and Economic
History, London: MacMillan; Hoskins, William George (1955), The Making of the
English Landscape, London: Hodder and Stoughton.
20. See St. George, Robert Blair (1982), ‘ “Set Thine House in Order”: The
Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New England’, in
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, Volume
II, Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, pp. 159–88; Catalog Entries: 188–351.
21. Jackson, John B. (1972), American Space: The Centennial Years, 1865–1876, New York:
W. W. Norton; Jackson, John B. (1986), Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, New
Haven: Yale University Press; Stilgoe, John (1983), Common Landscape in America,
1580–1845, New Haven: Yale University Press; Meinig, Donald W. (1979), The
Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, New York: Oxford University Press.
22. McDaniel, George (1982), Hearth and Home: Preserving a People’s Culture,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Upton, Dell (1997), Holy Things and
Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia, Cambridge: MIT Press;
Jordan, Terry and Matti Kaups (1989), The American Backwoods Frontier, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press. See also Schulz, Christian Norberg and Gunna
Bugge (1990), Stave og Laft, Oslo: Norsk Arkitekturforlag, as well as the wealth of

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studies listed on various vernacular architecture web sites. Many of the seminal
articles on vernacular architecture in the United States are assembled in Upton,
Dell and John Vlach (eds) (1986), Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular
Architecture, Athens: University of Georgia Press.
23. Bachelard, Gaston (1964), The Poetics of Space, New York: Orion Press.
24. Glassie, Henry (1975), Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic
Artifacts, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. The essential works are: Levi-
Strauss, Claude (1967), Structural Anthropology, Garden City: Doubleday; Geertz,
Clifford (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books; and Chomsky,
Noam (1968), Language and the Mind, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
25. Barthes, Roland (1968), Elements of Semiology, New York: Hill and Wang; Barthes,
Roland (1972), Mythologies, New York: Hill and Wang. See also Martin, Ann Smart
and J. Ritchie Garrison (1997), American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field,
Winterthur: The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, pp. 1–21; Tilley,
Christopher (ed.) (1990), Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics, and
Post-Structuralism, London: Basil Blackwell; Yokota, Kariann Akemi (2007), ‘Post-
colonialism and Material Culture in the Early Republic’, William and Mary Quarterly,
64:2 (Third Series), pp. 263–70.
26. A study that uses dramatic theory and phenomenology is Isaac, Rhys (1982), The
Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press. See pp. 323–57, ‘A Discourse on the Method’.
27. McCracken, Grant (1988), Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic
Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Bloomington: Indiana University Press;
McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer and John H. Plumb (1982), The Birth of a Consumer
Society: Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, London: Europa; Breen,
Timothy. H. (2004), The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped
American Independence, New York: Oxford University Press; Yokota, Kariann Akemi
(2011), Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation,
New York: Oxford University Press.
28. St. George, Robert Blair (1998), Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial
New England Culture, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; Chartier,
Roger (1984), ‘Appropriation as Culture: Popular Culture Uses in Early Modern
France’, in Stephen Kaplan (ed.) (1985), Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from
the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 229–54;
Schama, Simon (1988), The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture
in the Golden Age, Berkeley: University of California Press; de Certeau, Michel
(1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: The University of California Press;
Douglas, Mary (1982), Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, New York:
Pantheon.
29. Ames, Kenneth (1992), Death in the Dining Room & Other Tales of Victorian Culture,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
30. Kouwenhoven, John (1964), ‘American Studies: Words or Things’, in Marshall
Fishwick (ed.), American Studies in Transition, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press. Reprinted in Schlereth, Thomas J. (ed.) (1982), Material
Culture Studies in America, Nashville: American Association for State and Local
History, pp. 79–92.
31. Ames, Death in the Dining Room, p. 3
32. Glassie, Henry (1999), Material Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
p. 46.

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33. Bonnell, Victoria E. and Lynn Hunt (eds) (1999), Beyond the Cultural Turn, Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 11.
34. Auslander, Leora (1996), Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France, Berkeley:
University of California Press; Alder, Kenneth (1999), Engineering the Revolution:
Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815, Princeton: Princeton University Press;
Jones, Jennifer (2004), Sexing la Mode, Oxford: Berg Publishers.
35. Auslander, Leora (2005), ‘Beyond Words’, American Historical Review, 110:4,
pp. 1015–45.
36. Auslander, et al. (2009), ‘AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material
Culture’, American Historical Review, 114:5, pp. 1364, 1365, 1375, 1371.
37. Ibid. pp. 378, 1379. Convincing evidence for this contention can be found in
Sennett, Richard (2008), The Craftsman, New Haven: Yale University Press; Pye,
David (1968), The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press; Pye, David (1982), The Nature and Aesthetics of Design, New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold.
38. Auslander, Taste and Power; Auslander, Leora (2009), Cultural Revolutions: Everyday
Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
39. Ulrich, Laurel (2001), The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an
American Myth, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
40. Other exemplary works are: Miller, Marla (2006), The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work
in the Age of Revolution, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press; Cooke, Edward
S. Jr. (1996), Making Furniture in Preindustrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown
and Woodbury, Connecticut, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; Hood,
Adrienne D. (2003), The Weaver’s Craft: Cloth, Commerce, and Industry in Early
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Forty, Adrian (1986),
Objects of Desire: Design and Society from Wedgwood to IBM, New York: Pantheon.
41. Garrison, J. Ritchie (2006), Two Carpenters: Architecture and Building in Early New
England, 1799–1859, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
42. See also Jaffee, David (2011), A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early
America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Petroski, Henry (1992), The
Evolution of Useful Things, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press and Basalla,
George (1989), The Evolution of Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
are examples of the multitude of works on the history of technology, as is the
journal Technology and Culture.
43. Vlach, John (1991), By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife,
Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia; Hill, Sarah (1997), Weaving New
Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Baskets, Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press; Jones, Michael Owen (1975), The Handmade Object and Its
Maker, Berkeley: University of California Press.
44. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 67.
45. Auslander, Leora (1993), ‘Perceptions of Beauty and the Problem of
Consciousness: Parisian Furniture Makers’, in Leonard Berlanstein (ed.),
Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, pp. 149–81.
46. Mintz, Sidney W. (1985), Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History,
New York: Viking.
47. Examples of this genre are: Freedman, Paul (2008), Out of the East: Spices and the
Medieval Imagination, New Haven: Yale University Press; Helstosky, Carol (2004),

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Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy, Oxford: Berg; Corn, Charles (1999), The
Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade, Tokyo: Kodansha International; McNeil,
Cameron (ed.) (2009), Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao,
Tallahassee: University Press of Florida; Salaman, Redcliffe and John G. Hawkes
(eds) (1985), The History and Social Influence of the Potato, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
48. Meikle, Jeffrey L. (1995), American Plastic: A Cultural History, New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
49. Green, Harvey (2006), Wood: Craft, Culture, History, New York: Viking. See also
Anderson, Jennifer (2007), ‘Nature’s Currency: The Atlantic Mahogany Trade,
1720–1830’, Ph.D. dissertation, New York University.
50. Examples of the heroic genre are: Kurlansky, Mark (2002), Salt: A World History,
New York: Penguin; Kurlansky, Mark (1997), Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed
the World, New York: Penguin; Zuckerman, Larry (1998), The Potato: How the Humble
Spud Rescued the Western World, New York: North Point Books; Laszlo, Peter (2007),
Citrus: A History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Logan, William Bryant
(2005), Oak: The Frame of Civilization, New York: W. W. Norton Co.; Yafa, Steven
(2004), Big Cotton: How a Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, and Put
America on the Map, New York: Viking. A few have a form of citation that is so odd as
to be bizarre; they are not numbered or otherwise designated on the page. Thus
readers are unaware of their existence unless they find them by happenstance.
These ‘notes’ slumber at the back of the book. Brief quotations of the author’s text,
they are referenced to sources, sometimes without page numbers. These faux
citations give the appearance of research in primary sources, but leave the reader
virtually no tracks to follow.

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