Paper Abstracts
Fifth Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars
April 14, 2007
Note: Papers selected for the Sixth Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars will be announced in January 2008.
sarah amato
Of Auto-Icons and Stuffed Pets: Science, Sentiment and Victorian Taxidermy
Was there a connection between the ghoulish preservation of philosopher Jeremy Bentham's body and the stuffed remains of animals prominently displayed in Victorian museums, shops and parlours?
Jeremy Bentham's request, stated in his will of 1832, that his body be "anatomized in the most public manner", his skeleton preserved, dressed, and stored in a wooden box along with glass cases containing his head and other "soft parts" of his body in University College London, puzzled contemporaries of the great philosopher as well as succeeding generations. Bentham's "Auto-Icon" essay, which outlines the rationale for conserving his remains, has been met with similar bewilderment. Was this Bentham's last rational act in the cause of utility, an engagement with debates on issues of anatomical dissection or a manifestation of megalomania?
This paper addresses interpretive problems arising from the consideration of (once) living bodies as objects. The materiality of bodies lies at the heart of my discussion, since the taxidermic body is one that has been entirely transformed into an inanimate object. Although in recent years scholars have begun to consider the material culture of body adornment and modification, thereby acknowledging and perpetuating an objectification of the body (itself problematic), I wonder if bodies can be dispassionately considered alongside other objects in the ways that serious scholarship requires. A discussion of taxidermy highlights these problems—provoking (in me at least) discomfort and a strangely morbid fascination. My approach to this topic integrates material culture methodologies with historical analysis.
My discussion will consider the evolution of Victorian taxidermy, examining Jeremy Bentham's "Auto-Icon" alongside other nineteenth-century taxidermic mounts. Bentham's deliberately posed corpse was similar to other taxidermic specimens found on parlour mantels and in museums. These included preserved pets under glass domes, stuffed kittens dressed in elaborate costumes, and mounted animals carefully classified and displayed. As heartfelt, funny, informative, ghoulish, and cruel, this taxidermy was at once scientific and highly sentimental. By the end of the century natural history museums had been transformed from chaotic rooms filled with badly preserved and rotting specimens to ordered exhibition halls featuring tableaux of personified animals (fierce lions, devious wolves, happy rabbits). Prominent scientists and museum curators described their techniques of display as artistic recreations of life in death. Their tableaux evoked private memorials of stuffed pets and the bizarre work of amateur taxidermist Walter Potter. The Walter Potter Collection, created in the second half of the nineteenth-century, included "The Kitten's Wedding," a tableau of stuffed kittens, lavishly dressed and enacting a wedding; other vignettes showed rabbits in a classroom and guinea pigs playing croquet. Like Bentham's "Auto-Icon", the manipulated remains of animals became representations of personal and national histories, demonstrating a highly sentimental attachment to life, mastership of nature, secular dominion over death—and ultimately an extreme form of kitsch.
In order to elaborate on these themes, I will consider nineteenth-century taxidermic specimens and manuals, Jeremy Bentham's writings, and late nineteenth-century visitor books from the Booth Museum (Brighton, England) which contain reactions to 'artistic' taxidermic displays.
Sarah Amato is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Toronto.
jillian gould
Memorial University of Newfoundland
The Jewish Home Beautiful and a Sabbath Tea: Aesthetics of Jewish Table Settings and Performing Hospitality
This paper will explore the aesthetics of Jewish table settings and the meaning of hospitality through time, text, and performance. Firstly I will examine the Jewish Home Beautiful (1941): part cookbook, part instructional for holiday table setting, and part dramatic script, this text and its accompanying photographs of holiday tables are a celebration of Jewish domestic life. Next, the paper will flash forward to a present-day Toronto Jewish retirement home, where about a dozen women host and serve a weekly Sabbath Tea. The resident hostesses (all in their late 80s and 90s) have organized the Tea around a precise set of rules and customs for serving and preparing the tea and a nosh (something to eat). The Tea highlights themes of domestic and Jewish culture, and hospitality, in a place where both the hosts and guests are residents of the same large place called "home."
Throughout the paper I will raise several questions: what does it mean when Jewish holiday and domestic rituals (private) are performed or re-enacted in public spaces? How does the meaning of these rituals – and ritual objects – change when they are removed from their original setting? Questions of home, the performance of "Jewishness" and hospitality, and the aesthetics of table setting will be addressed as well. Moving from an analysis of a historic display of holiday table settings to a present-day ethnographic account of serving a Sabbath Tea, the paper will explore forms of Jewish hospitality that have been at least once-removed from their original domestic setting.
Jillian Gould is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her dissertation research looks at the life and culture of a Toronto Jewish retirement home, taking a close look at a weekly resident-run Sabbath Tea, and explores themes of domestic and Jewish culture, the culture of aging, hospitality, and material culture.
bryn varley hollenbeck
Univerisity of Delaware
Cultivating the Wild: The Domesic Exterior in Modern Child Rearing
American parents in the first half of the twentieth century sent their children outdoors, encouraged by experts to let the children interact with nature in order to "cultivate the wild." There are, however, two very different views of what it means to cultivate. On one hand, to cultivate means to tame or domesticate. In this sense, "the wild" was something to be ordered, organized and conquered. The other view is that to cultivate is to nurture something, to allow it to grow and be productive. In this sense, "the wild" was an undefiled innocence that needed careful tending in order not to be snuffed out by the rigors of adult society. This dichotomy was the core of the dilemma of parents wishing to do right by their offspring. Parents could use their yards to shape their children into adults, or they could use their yards to encourage wild or "childish" behavior. Increasingly over the first half of the twentieth century parents dedicated more and more land immediately surrounding their homes for their children's use, either as gardens or as play yards. Child rearing experts and cultural commentators encouraged parents to give their children garden plots of their own and/or to provide outdoor play apparatus. The garden and the playground are two very different conceptions of the yard, and result in very different material spaces. Yet in both of these childcentered yards, parents had a choice to make: they could use the domestic exterior to prune their children into upstanding adults, or they could use the outdoors to encourage and prolong childhood.
This paper is about the personal spaces of childhood and child rearing outside the home and the ways in which parents constructed these spaces to define and shape their offspring's childhood. The yard, courtyard, stoop, and roof top are the domestic spaces of growth, play, enculturation, and development outside the walls of the house or apartment. Urban, suburban, and rural children all inhabited the outer realm of the home just as they inhabited the interior of their family's house, yet despite the importance of the yard scholars of childhood and domestic design typically ignore this space. In this paper I briefly examine the design ideals of the familial domestic exterior: the child's garden and the private playground. I explore the active meaning parents embedded in and through flower beds and sandboxes, the ways in which this material culture was used to define modern American childhoods, and these definitions' effects on the domestic exterior and the design of childhood objects.
Both the garden and the play yard could be wild or cultivated. Both could encourage refinement and social, cultural, mental, and intellectual development; or, they could encourage innate instincts, physicality, and childish imagination. In addition to providing necessary exercise space, healthful air and sunshine, and a controlled, safe environment for children, the domestic exterior offered mothers and fathers a parenting choice. The domestic exterior was a necessary space for modern child rearing, but it also continually highlighted a basic question about the meaning of childhood in modern America. The design, allocation, and use of the domestic exterior challenged parents to define what the child should be: a natural creature in wild, untamed nature, or a maturing citizen in the civilized garden.
Bryn Varley Hollenbeck is a doctoral candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware. She holds a BA in American Studies from Skidmore College and a MA in History from the University of Delaware. Bryn was a 2005-2006 McNeil Dissertation Fellow at Winterthur Museum and Library. This paper is drawn from her dissertation, in which she examines the material culture of American children in domestic settings from the late-nineteenth century to the post-World War II era.
philippa hubbard
Eighteenth Century Advertising: The Trade Card in Britain and America
This paper investigates the role and functioning of trade cards in eighteenth century Britain and America. Trade cards were unique, highly visual advertisements that allowed shopkeepers and tradesmen to promote themselves and their wares in a polite manner. Despite their use as an illustrative historical source, they have rarely been considered in their own right, as objects encoded with cultural significance. Using several hundred examples from the most important British and American trade card collections, including the one at Winterthur, the paper explores how trade cards functioned as both art and advertising in the Atlantic world. As a highly graphic, engraved genre the trade card circulated as a miniature art work, but it also operated as a form of material culture with social and economic functions. I propose that the trade card was as a prescient form of advertising. It was a communicative device that connected the craftsman, the tradesman and the consumer, and generated various, associated meanings.
The paper explores the methodological challenges posed by working with an object that, beyond itself, is largely absent from the historical record. It suggests how the testimony of the cards themselves can be combined with theoretical approaches from sociology, anthropology, material and visual culture studies. Drawing on the evidence from trade cards the paper examines them as physical 'things'. I consider how their materiality affected their various uses, and explore their function as objects that were circulated and exchanged (the American examples are particularly suggestive). Trade cards were advertisements that were posted out or distributed by hand, and were also regularly used as bills. Here the transitory nature of trade cards is addressed. Many London cards appear in Scottish household accounts, and many English examples appear in North America, perhaps transported with goods or via merchants and travellers. Trade cards were at the heart of the spectacle of consumption and international trade. I argue that their multiple functionality and sophisticated use of imagery made them distinct from newspaper advertisements and hand bills.
Trade cards suggestively interfaced text and image to connect consumers with the experiences of purchasing and displaying commodities. Furthermore, their complex imagery attempted to sell culture, as well as goods, to consumers in diverse national settings.
Working with recent material culture scholarship about the role of agency in the construction of social identities, and Pierre Bourdieu's critique of social distinction, I move on to suggest that tradesmen could carefully choreograph the use of trade cards to negotiate their own social and vocational roles. Primarily, the paper explores the trade card as a gift given away at the point of transaction, exchanged between shopkeeper and customer. Despite the trade card's ubiquity its select dissemination generated an intimate mode of contact, and allowed it to operate within the same polite world as the visiting card or miniature. The proximity of the trade card to self, through hand to hand contact, established and reinforced the relationship between buyer and seller. The paper represents the trade card as a communicative device and suggests the role it played in the transmission of ideas about status, taste, knowledge and power.
Philippa Hubbard is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Warwick in England. She is currently on a PhD Student Exchange in the department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
michelle ladd
The Substance of Smoke: Cigars in American Culture, 1880-1930
As objects meant to be enjoyed on nearly every sensory level, yet ultimately smoked out of existence, cigars perfectly emblematize the contradictions of modernity, presenting both possibilities and problems for researchers of modern American culture. Though cigars offer fleeting pleasure, the end of which is always waste, they always also mark the weighty pursuit of self-motivated autonomy fundamental to American identity. Cigars, then, are neither permanent nor completely evanescent. Their presence lingers in ephemera, in cultural lore, and in the cigar butts that litter the novels that move American literature from realism to naturalism to modernism at the turn of the twentieth century.
Made from raw materials that are fundamentally associated with exotic bodies – and fantasies about those bodies – the cigar is fashioned into an object of great value. Like other objects imbued with a mysterious attraction that extends beyond their use or exchange, the cigar becomes much more than its raw material, an object of substance. In spite of the cigar's premodern resonances, however, its popularity was facilitated by rationalized production methods that made cigars cheaper and more accessible. Improvements in production meant that demand had to be stimulated, and smoking was encouraged by chromolithographic processes that allowed manufacturers to advertise their brands through colorful gilded cigar-box labels, whose subjects ranged from sentimental domestic pleasures such as kittens and pretty women to imperial fetishes such as islands and Indians.
This paper focuses on the exotic, imperial cigar labels produced during this period to understand the role ephemeral objects like labels and the cigars they promoted played in modern subject-object relations: in late-nineteenth century American culture, the cigar symbolized not only the imagined natural Other, but also the process of objectification required for modern subject formation. In particular, this paper broaches the ways in which cigar labels correlate to the emotional satisfaction of mastery, accomplished through the seemingly clear objectification of people, lands, and goods evident in cigar label. Smoking these cigars was a performative masculine gesture that allowed a modern man to experience emotional control over nature, feared "primitive" figures, and the economic processes of what we would now call the "global South."
At the same time, however, these images place the Other within the national imaginary, simultaneously invoking and disguising difference. As such, the labels illuminate both the promise and impossibility of modern "progress," contradictory positions sustained by the cigar, an object that embodies exotic power, nostalgic longing, and modern commerce.
Through this analysis, a thorny problem emerges. On many levels, smoking represents the kind of obsolescence at the root of cultural anxiety about materiality. Neither the cigars nor the cigar labels were meant to last. In examining these labels, ephemera takes on new dimensions. These images become more than visual evidence of now-unfashionable attitudes about our raced and gendered Others. They illustrate that the modern autonomous self, so present in rhetorics of national identity, relied on an untenuous distinction between self and other that was predicated on particular relations to objects, objects whose materiality was often insubstantial.
Michelle Ladd received her doctorate in Cultural Studies from Claremont Graduate University in2006. Her dissertation was titled, Sometimes a Cigar... Literature and the American Experience of Modernity.
abigail markoe
Advertising Healthy Babies and Marketing 'Modernity': Baby Competitions and Public Health Weeks in Colonial Africa
African mothers living in 1930s Johannesburg and Lagos heard strong messages from colonial and missionary groups about what defined a good mother and a healthy baby. They were enjoined to dress their infants a certain way, to feed them at specified hours with prescribed foods, and to bring them to well-child clinics where their children's food, clothing, weight, and health could be supervised by European physicians and mission-educated African nurses. Medical missionaries teamed up with colonial public health officials to organize annual "Health Weeks" in both cities, with events such as parades, films, and baby competitions teaching western ideas of 'scientific motherhood.' Importantly, baby competitions and health weeks not only promoted health, but they also promoted consumerism. European organizers wanted African women to become consumers on two levels – consumers of material goods as well ideas of Christianity, domesticity, and so-called 'modern' public health.
This paper will analyze the rhetoric of modernity, civilization and consumerism that practitioners of colonial and missionary medicine promoted during the annual Health Weeks and at African baby competitions. It will examine the Lagos Health and Baby Week of 1939, the Johannesburg Health Weeks of the 1930s, and the 1934 baby competition of the South African newspaper, Bantu World. This competition, geared toward the emerging African middle class and sponsored by Nutrine, a popular infant formula company, offers historians the opportunity to study the relationship between advertising material goods and advertising 'modernity' in colonial public health. The author will use a variety of sources, including the material culture involved in the promotion of modern motherhood, to ask questions about the nature of these public health events and their implication for Nigerian and South African history. Sources include documentary films of the Lagos health week, photographs of baby competition contestants, and newspaper advertisements along with standard colonial and missionary documents such as public health reports and missionary magazines. The paper will ask, what was the relationship between class and race during the planning and implementation of colonial public health events? To what degree did white missionaries and colonial officials influence African women to participate, and to what degree did their participation entail agency and choice? And finally, how did material objects such as baby photographs, children's clothing, cradles, and infant formula contribute to the development of African ideas of proper motherhood and healthy childhood?
Baby competitions and annual Health Weeks advertised healthy childhood and in doing so, they advertised modernity—but, as this paper will show, it was a modernity that was contested and created by African participation, not simply dictated by European actors.
Abigail Markoe is a PhD candidate at the Institute of the History of Medicine, and a MHS (Masters in Health Services) candidate in the School of Public Health, both at Johns Hopkins University.
lara pascali
Baby Books and Childhood Narratives: Writing the Self through Material Culture
The life histories of most women and men are neither written in bestselling books nor portrayed on film; they are enacted through objects and spaces. People actively engage the material world to perform biographical work. Objects such as souvenirs, photographic albums, scrapbooks and trophies are mnemonic devices which serve to authenticate past events and personal achievements, and to create spaces for the performance of individual and family narratives. In this paper, I examine an understudied category of such objects: the baby book, a genre of pre-printed memory album in which parents - usually mothers - record the development of their babies, from birth through the first year(s) of childhood. A Victorian innovation, baby books fall within the larger prescriptive practice of record-keeping that became common during the nineteenth century, and speak to contemporary notions of health, childhood and progress.
Focusing on one baby book within a wider sample of over one hundred books from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, I examine the ways in which these objects construct ideological narratives of childhood and of the self, in order to raise larger questions about the nature of self-fashioning and memory. The underlying assumption is that the process of self-creation is rooted in the material world, and is one that is fundamentally social and performative.
My analysis takes as a starting point the baby book of John E. Thomas Jr., born on September 9th, 1919. Like other early baby books, it is illustrated using the visual imagery of sentimentality, and contains photos, letters and archival records related to the early years of the John's life. These are accompanied by narration in two kinds of script, as well as red, embossed plastic labels. The earlier script is of the mother, while the later is of the son, the subject of the album, and the person who also, presumably, added the embossed plastic labels. As a specific genre, the baby book is a site for the inscription of conventionalized information. However, the various interventions by mother and baby/son represent unique, idiosyncratic gestures that resist the generalizing tendencies of the form, and speak to the object's penchant towards both stasis and movement. On the one hand, the baby book offers a physical space for the containment of time and the concretization of memory, and yet the later additions of son locate memory in physical spaces that can be continuously re-visited and even altered. Comparing the prescriptive and inscriptive elements of this baby book to others within the wider sample, I argue that baby books create idealized biographies through the negotiation and re-construction of memories into materialized narratives of progress.
Positing baby books as "materialized biographies," this research inserts itself into larger, critical discussions surrounding the nature of materiality, led by anthropologists and archaeologists such as Lynn Meskell and Daniel Miller. These scholars suggest that materiality refers not to things themselves, but to the interaction between people and things – specifically, our ability to insert ourselves into our physical surroundings. Materiality thus refers to the process through which we constitute our identities through the physical world. These ideas are central to the study of the baby book, a medium through which we literally and symbolically write ourselves and our histories.
Lara Pascali is a student in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. She received her MA in Architecture, Domestic Environment, and Cultural Landscape Studies from McGill University in 2004.
christine reiser
'With all the Pomp of Olden Days': Materializing Community in Public Historical Imagery and Dramatic Display
Prompted by anxieties over changing cultural, ethnic, and technological American landscapes, in the early 1900's concerned American citizens adopted historical costuming, imagery, and pageantry as a means by which to promote community ties and progressive reform through a backward look at an idyllic past. Sites of contest for group legitimacy, belonging, and representation, historical pageants represented a departure from previous commemorative practices in their treatment of public performance as participatory modes of action by which to foster social transformation. Concurrent with the Pageantry movement, American Indian 'revitalization' movements exploded in southern New England as Indian groups throughout the region endeavored to increase their visibility to both native and non-native audiences and effectively end a two-century long silence in public acknowledgment of persistent Indian communities. As anthropologist Ann McMullen has argued, working within a highly racialized landscape they formed regional alliances, founded fraternal organizations, and appropriated symbols of Indianness from across the continent in a conscious construction of public practice and group identity. A central feature of these efforts, and the most studied aspect of the movements to date, was the promotion of a recognizably 'Indian' phenotype through the creation and use of pan-Indian regalia (traditional dress).
Imbricated in this revitalization strategy, though, was not simply the adoption of object-traits. Rather, it included increasing awareness of "Indianness" through collective performance. In this, participants in the efforts could draw important parallels from the American Historical Pageantry Movement. Like pageantry sponsors, participants in revitalization emphasized public ceremony, community ritual, and visible symbols as a way to forge a new community. In the 1920's and 1930's a number of Indian groups held public ceremonies with event programs that included prayers, pipe ceremonies, demonstrations of 'Indian rites and dances', and marriage ceremonies. I examine these ceremonies through the study of a compilation of observations, notes, newspaper clippings, and photographs of such events contained in a 1930's scrapbook curated by the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology1; through comparison to colonist-Indian reenactment scenes in American Historical Pageant programs and photographs in Brown University's Hay Library Special Collections; and through examination of 20th century regalia from the region.
Though some scholars have interpreted the adoption of such "generic" performances and pan-Indian object-traits as inventions, reclamations or adoptions of tradition, I find more useful conceptual tools in materiality and historical studies of memory. Shifting emphasis away from concerns for authenticity, this joint approach underscores that it is not enough to understand how memories, imagery, and tradition are negotiated and agreed upon but that it also must be interrogated how they are manipulated and used. From a material culture standpoint, this opens the door to challenging more limited conceptions of material culture-as-objects by including public performance – the use of material objects in spectacle – as part and parcel of this materiality. In such a treatment, objects are not static items, nor are they interpreted merely contextually, but are fundamentally conceived experientially. Examining both objects themselves and the historical traces that evidence their usage on the body, in the community, and to the public enables such understandings.
Combining local elements of southern New England Indian cultures with pan-Indian elements in public display provided a mechanism by which Indians could propagandistically promote their own versions of history and grouphood – versions of public memory and historical consciousness which stood in contrast to those put forward in pageantry and popular mainstream history. These efforts are not merely historical: they continue today in the persistent use of similar adornment, regalia, and practices in celebrations of Native culture, particularly powwows, today. In so doing, they speak to both historical and contemporary recognitions that "the past" is a body of knowledge and a perception, both communal and private, which continually has action through material objects and performance. That this agenda was and continues to be achieved through the incorporation and blending of elements reflects the dynamic ways in which identities and community are actively negotiated through the exchange and mediation of materiality.
Christine Reiser is a Ph.D. student at Brown University in the Department of Anthropology, from which she also holds an M.A. Her training and research draws on historical archaeology, ethnohistory, and public humanities/museum studies to explore interests in community, identity, race, memory, myth, and the social uses of space. She is currently working on a dissertation focused on the social networking of interethnic Native American hamlet communities in eighteenth and nineteenth century southern New England.
jennifer van horn
Removing the mask: destroying selfhood in colonial portraiture
Scholars of colonial America's material and visual world have fruitfully probed the ways that objects inscribe gendered, rank-based, and racial identities upon the subject (in the case of the portrait) or the owner (in the case of a purchased good.) These studies have established material culture's contribution to the creation of the self. This paper explores the opposite process, objects' potential to destabilize identity, through a group of colonial masquerade portraits that epitomize objects' ability to disjoint, to unhinge, or to compromise the coherence of the self. By arguing that forms of visual and material culture which questioned the nature of selfhood played a vital but overlooked role in colonial America, the study encourages a larger reconsideration of the relationship between object and self that recognizes and even delights in the irresolvable tensions inherent in identity formation.
At the center of this paper is one of the most elegant, luxurious, and unusual portraits painted in the American colonies, that of Charlestonian Ann Gibbes (figure 1.) Gibbes appears to be on her way to a masked ball; she wears "vandyke" dress and prominently displays a black mask in her right hand. Her portrait is one of a small group that fictionalize southern women as masqueraders painted by the London-trained artist John Wollaston (active 1749-1767.) Wollaston's portraits employ the potent device of the masque to explore an evolving Atlantic discussion about sexuality, portraiture, and disguise. While North Americans did not hold public masquerade balls in the colonial period, they, like their metropolitan counterparts, invoked the masque as a symbol of the dangerous potential for passionate behavior and the mutability of civilized identity. The most uncivilized of rituals, the masquerade encouraged Englishmen and especially English women to dress as exotic others, to indulge their sensual desires, and to willingly relinquish polite behavior, transforming themselves into literal as well as metaphorical savages. Because colonial Americans were not active participants in the masquerade their experiences of the masque occurred almost exclusively through objects and texts. Philadelphian Francis Hopkinsons' poetry and epistolary fiction, narratives of masquerades both real and fictional published in colonial newspapers, and finally masquerade scenes in English novels that circulated around the Atlantic, including Richardson's Pamela Part Two (1741) and Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), constitute the texts by which colonists vicariously masqueraded. Analyzing Wollaston's masquerade portraits through the eyes of colonial and metropolitan authors demonstrates that the questions raised by the paintings were those of the masque itself: what became of civility in the presence of unbridled sexuality, where did real identity reside, and how did the presence of the other unleash dangerous behavior in previously civilized men and more importantly in women? At the same time, however, connections between portraits and texts are more structural. The evolving form of the novel provides a parallel to the workings of the masquerade portrait. Masquerade scenes invoke disequilibrium, questioning the ability of any person to have a coherent identity that can be represented, an argument that denied the very project of the novel. So too does Gibbes' portrait question a person's capacity to have a single true identity, calling attention to the inherent fiction of any portrait, and playfully contradicting the notion of a true self as represented in art and literature. Rather than reinforcing identity the masquerade portraits threaten the entire structure upon which the self is formed and open a new avenue for study of early American images and objects.
Jennifer Van Horn is a doctoral candidate in American art at the University of Virginia. She holds an MA from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and a BA from the University of Delaware. Her research interests include eighteenth and nineteenth-century American visual and material culture. This paper derives from a part of her dissertation, "The Object of Civility and the Art of Politeness in British America (1740-1780)."