History from things : essays on material culture

Lubar, Steven D. (Added Author). Kingery, W. D. (Added Author).

Summary: History from Things explores the many ways objects - defined broadly to range from Chippendale tables and Italian Renaissance pottery to seventeenth-century parks and a New England cemetery - can reconstruct and help to reinterpret the past. Eighteen essays describe how to "read" artifacts, how to "listen to" landscapes and locations, and how to apply methods and theories to historical inquiry that have previously belonged solely to archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and conservation scientists. The contributors demonstrate that artifacts can be prime historical evidence that discloses important facts about the nature of past cultures. The book shows how, for example, the detailed examination of Chinese Zhou bronzes revealed that a factory system of production - nowhere attested to in documentary sources - existed in China as early as the fifth century B.C.

Record details

ISBN: 1560982047 (alk. paper)
ISBN: 9781560982043 (alk. paper)
ISBN: 1560986131 (Buchrücken)
ISBN: 9781560986133 (Buchrücken)
Physical Description: print
xvii, 300 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.
Publisher: Washington : Smithsonian Institution Press, c1993.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references.

Formatted Contents Note:

The truth of material culture : history or fiction? / Jules David Prown -- Why we need things / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi -- Objects as instruments, objects as signs / Jacques Maquet -- Some matters of substance / Robert Friedel -- The ancestry of Chinese bronze vessels / Jessica Rawson -- The interpretation of artifacts in the history of technology / Robert B. Gordon -- Gardens and society in eighteenth-century England / Thomas Williamson -- Common landscapes as historic documents / Peirce Lewis -- The New England cemetery as a cultural landscape / Ian W. Brown -- Artifacts as expressions of society and culture : subversive genealogy and the value of history / Mark P. Leone and Barbara J. Little -- Why take a behavioral approach to folk objects? / Michael Owen Jones -- Machine politics : the political construction of technological artifacts / Steven Lubar.