Material Culture in America: Understanding Everyday Life by Shirley Wajda, Helen Sheumaker

By Shirley Wajda, Helen Sheumaker

Reaching again four hundred years, fabric lifestyles in the United States: An Encyclopedia is the 1st reference displaying what the examine of fabric tradition finds approximately American society—revelations no longer obtainable via conventional assets and methods.

In approximately 2 hundred entries, the encyclopedia lines the background of artifacts, suggestions and concepts, industries, peoples and cultures, cultural productions, old forces, sessions and kinds, non secular and secular rituals and traditions, and masses extra. each person from researchers and curators to scholars and basic readers will locate instance after instance of the way the items and environments created or altered by way of people demonstrate as a lot approximately American existence as diaries, records, and texts.

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Com influential in the eighteenth century: Imitating European manor houses, farmers expanded simple one- or two-celled structures into Georgian-style, multicelled houses with specialized spaces, delegating socializing, sleep, and manufacturing into distinct units. In settled regions, the level of architectural sophistication grew steadily over the nineteenth century. Wood clapboard farmhouses sported Classical Revival motifs, including pillars, semicircular fanlights, and large, symmetrically placed windows; interiors often included several bedrooms, a “front parlor” for entertaining guests, an informal sitting room for family and close friends, a kitchen and pantry, and, at least in some plans published in agricultural periodicals, a library.

In Neshoba County, Mississippi, for example, Choctaws, whites, and blacks attended their famous fair together through the first half of the twentieth century. In 1954, when the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas inspired a fresh civil rights crusade, some fairgoers observed that black people were absent. Despite awareness, segregation continued. Racial diversity also made a mark in the West, where Indians organized some of their own fairs. The most important and earliest example was the Indian International Fair in Muskogee, Indian Territory, which Cherokee and Creek leaders started in 1874.

European immigrants to North America, as well as Africans brought as slaves, carried with them new customs using animals, and these customs often blended into new forms. The Europeans brought hunting traditions, including the material culture associated with hunting, from firearms and knives to butchering traditions to duck decoys and duck calls. Traditions regarding the building of hunting blinds, platforms, and even the hunting camp cabin are part of the material world of hunting. Hunting dogs themselves could be considered material objects used in the hunt, as hunters breed and train the dogs to be extensions of the hunter.

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