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Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture

Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture PDF Author: Kenneth L. Ames
Publisher:
ISBN: 1566393337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
In this provocative look at Victorian America, Kenneth Ames explores the minds of Victorians by examining some of their most distinctive and fascinating creations. Featuring five once-prominent home furnishings, he reconstructs a vanished culture and demonstrates the centrality of the artifact to historical understanding. Richly illustrated with photographs of surviving objects as well as images from a wide variety of period sources, the five essays discuss specific pieces—hallstands, sideboards, embroidered mottoes, parlor organs, and seating furniture—within the context of broader cultural issues and concerns. Ames reveals not only the major outlines of Victorian culture but also the conflicts and tensions deep within that culture. An extraordinary proliferation of goods characterizes the Victorian world. Throughout the study, Ames considers the relationship of some of these household objects to issues of class, gender, and place. For example, the importance of public image was dramatized by the rituals of the front hall in Victorian homes: its placement within the house, the massive hallstand with its receptacles for calling cards and umbrellas, accommodations for temporary and usually uncomfortable seating. The dining room was a shrine to the notion of "man's" dominion over nature—each elaborately carved sideboard displayed a frieze of slaughtered game and harvested vegetation. Parlor organs, a blending of the sacred and the profane, provided an occasion to display feminine accomplishment and to symbolize the role of the bourgeois Christian lady. Ames also discusses how the prevailing class and gender hierarchy was echoed in the posture of seating furniture and its arrangement. The author is one of the premier interpreters of Victorian culture in America. His witty, provocative, and irreverent commentary on the "quaint" fixtures of the Victorian household will fascinate scholars, antique buffs, and collectors on nostalgia. Author note: Kenneth L. Ames is Chief of Historical and Anthropological Surveys at the New York State Museum and was formerly Chair of the Office of Advanced Studies at the Winterthur Museum.

Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture

Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture PDF Author: Kenneth L. Ames
Publisher:
ISBN: 1566393337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
In this provocative look at Victorian America, Kenneth Ames explores the minds of Victorians by examining some of their most distinctive and fascinating creations. Featuring five once-prominent home furnishings, he reconstructs a vanished culture and demonstrates the centrality of the artifact to historical understanding. Richly illustrated with photographs of surviving objects as well as images from a wide variety of period sources, the five essays discuss specific pieces—hallstands, sideboards, embroidered mottoes, parlor organs, and seating furniture—within the context of broader cultural issues and concerns. Ames reveals not only the major outlines of Victorian culture but also the conflicts and tensions deep within that culture. An extraordinary proliferation of goods characterizes the Victorian world. Throughout the study, Ames considers the relationship of some of these household objects to issues of class, gender, and place. For example, the importance of public image was dramatized by the rituals of the front hall in Victorian homes: its placement within the house, the massive hallstand with its receptacles for calling cards and umbrellas, accommodations for temporary and usually uncomfortable seating. The dining room was a shrine to the notion of "man's" dominion over nature—each elaborately carved sideboard displayed a frieze of slaughtered game and harvested vegetation. Parlor organs, a blending of the sacred and the profane, provided an occasion to display feminine accomplishment and to symbolize the role of the bourgeois Christian lady. Ames also discusses how the prevailing class and gender hierarchy was echoed in the posture of seating furniture and its arrangement. The author is one of the premier interpreters of Victorian culture in America. His witty, provocative, and irreverent commentary on the "quaint" fixtures of the Victorian household will fascinate scholars, antique buffs, and collectors on nostalgia. Author note: Kenneth L. Ames is Chief of Historical and Anthropological Surveys at the New York State Museum and was formerly Chair of the Office of Advanced Studies at the Winterthur Museum.

Beastly Possessions

Beastly Possessions PDF Author: Sarah Amato
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442617608
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
In Beastly Possessions, Sarah Amato chronicles the unusual ways in which Victorians of every social class brought animals into their daily lives. Captured, bred, exhibited, collected, and sold, ordinary pets and exotic creatures – as well as their representations – became commodities within Victorian Britain’s flourishing consumer culture. As a pet, an animal could be a companion, a living parlour decoration, and proof of a household’s social and moral status. In the zoo, it could become a public pet, an object of curiosity, a symbol of empire, or even a consumer mascot. Either kind of animal might be painted, photographed, or stuffed as a taxidermic specimen. Using evidence ranging from pet-keeping manuals and scientific treatises to novels, guidebooks, and ephemera, this fascinating, well-illustrated study opens a window into an underexplored aspect of life in Victorian Britain.

Beds and Chambers in Late Medieval England

Beds and Chambers in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Hollie L. S. Morgan
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1903153719
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
First full-length interdisciplinary study of the effect of these everyday surroundings on literature, culture and the collective consciousness of the late middle ages.

Doing Women's History in Public

Doing Women's History in Public PDF Author: Heather Huyck
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442264187
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Book Description
A complete guide to interpreting women’s history. Women’s history is everywhere, not only in historic house museums named for women but also in homes named for famous men, museums of every conceivable kind, forts and battlefields, even ships, mines, and in buckets. Women’s history while present at every museum and historic site remains less fully interpreted in spite of decades of vibrant and expansive scholarship. Doing Women’s History in Public: A Handbook for Interpretation at Museums and Historic Sites connects that scholarship with the tangible resources and the sensuality that form museums and historic sites-- the objects, architecture and landscapes-- in ways that encourage visitor fascination and understanding and center interpretation on the women active in them. With numerous examples that focus on all women and girls, it appropriately includes everyone, for women intersect with every other human group. This book provides arguments, sources (written, oral, and visual), and tools for finding women’s history, preserving it, and interpreting it with the public. It uses the framework of Significance (importance), Knowledge Base (research in primary, secondary, and tertiary sources), and Tangible Resources (the preserved physical embodiment of history in objects, architecture, and landscapes). Discusses traditional and technology-assisted interpretation and provides Tools to implement Doing Women’s History in Public. Using a hospitality model, museums and historic sites are the locales where we assemble, learn from each other, and take our insights into a more gender-shared future.

Food and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century America

Food and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century America PDF Author: Mark McWilliams
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 075912096X
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Book Description
Food and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century America revolves around the 1840 presidential election when, according to campaign slogans, candidates were what they ate. Skillfully deploying the rhetoric of republican simplicity—the belief that plain dress, food, and manners were signs of virtue in the young republic—William Henry Harrison defeated Martin Van Buren by aligning the incumbent with the European luxuries of pâté de foie gras and soupe à la reine while maintaining that he survived on “raw beef without salt.” The effectiveness of such claims reflected not only the continuing appeal of the frontier and the relatively primitive nature of American cooking, but also a rhetorical struggle to define how eating habits and culinary practices fit into ideas of the American character. From this crucial mid-century debate, the book’s argument reaches back to examine the formation of the myth of republican simplicity in revolutionary America and forward to the popularization of cosmopolitan sophistication during the Gilded Age. Drawing heavily on cookbooks, domestic manuals, travel writing, and the popular press, this historical framework structures a discussion of ways novelists use food to locate characters within their fictional worlds, evoking or contesting deeply held social beliefs about gender, class, and race. In addition to mid-century novelists like Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Warner, the book examines popular and canonical novels by writers as diverse as Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, Susanna Rowson, Catharine Sedgwick, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Harriet Wilson. Some of these authors also wrote domestic manuals and cookbooks. In addition, McWilliams draws on a wide range of such work by William Alcott, Catharine Beecher, Eliza Leslie, Fannie Merrit Farmer, Maria Parloa, and others.

Popular Culture in a New Age

Popular Culture in a New Age PDF Author: Marshall Fishwick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317956729
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
With a Foreword by Dr. Fishwick's student--Tom Wolfe. This book redefines popular culture in the light of the revolutionary changes brought about by the information revolution and the digital divide. It explores the phenomenal growth and extension of popular culture in the last decade and ties in the vast changes brought about by technology and the Internet. In an era when American television and the Internet reach virtually every corner of the globe, Popular Culture in a New Age shows how the poorly understood and often underestimated area known as popular culture affects all of our lives. Beginning with an evaluation of the millennium celebrations and the enormous error of Y2K madness, Popular Culture in a New Age then moves on to the “New Gold Rush” brought about by technology and takes a hard look at its risks. The book examines a wide variety of pop culture phenomena such as carnivals, celebrities, and the road from nineteenth century humbuggery (P. T. Barnum's term) to today's hype. In Popular Culture in a New Age you'll learn about: the three faces of popular culture: folk, fake, and pop--how they relate and how they differ today's popular icons the empire of Disney World Marshall McLuhan, our era's most profound and shocking electronic thinker African-American popular culture and style Popular Culture in a New Age gives characterization to the postmodern world in a chapter on “postmodern pop,” followed by the shift from civil religion to civil disobedience and the “myth of success.” This insightful book will help you understand the way we eat, think, vote, and respond to our fast-changing world in the era of hype, spin doctors, chat rooms, and jargon.

Inside the Victorian Home

Inside the Victorian Home PDF Author: Judith Flanders
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393052091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

Book Description
A rich selection from diaries, letters, advice books, magazines, and paintings creates a rooms-by-room portrait of Victorian life--from childbirth in the master bedroom to separate gender domains in the drawing room and parlor.

"Women and Things, 1750?950 "

Author: MaureenDaly Goggin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351536737
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 506

Book Description
In contrast to much current scholarship on women and material culture which focuses primarily on women as consumers, this essay collection provides case studies of women who produced material objects. The essays collected here make an original contribution to material culture studies by focusing on women's social practices in relation to material culture. The essays as a whole are concerned with women's complex and active engagement with material culture in the various stages of the material object's life cycle, from design and production to consumption, use, and redeployment. Also, theorized and described are the ways in which women engaged in meaning making, identity formation, and commemoration through their manipulation of materials and techniques, ranging from taxidermy and shell work to collecting autographs and making scrapbooks. This volume takes as its object of investigation the overlooked and often despised categories of women's decorative and craft activities as sites of important cultural and social work. This volume is interdisciplinary with essays by art historians, social historians, literary critics, rhetoricians, and museum curators. The scope of the volume is international with essays on eighteenth-century German silhouettes, Australian aboriginal ritual practices, Brittany mourning rites, and Soviet-era recipes that provide a comparative framework for the majority of essays which focus on British and North American women who lived and worked in the long nineteenth century. This volume will appeal to a broad range of students and scholars in women's history, art history, cultural studies, museum studies, anthropology, cultural and social history, literature, rhetoric, and material culture studies.

Preserved

Preserved PDF Author: Dean G. Lampros
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421448416
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
A spirited look at how funeral homes impacted American consumerism, the built environment, and national identities. Funeral homes—those grand, aging mansions repurposed into spaces for embalming, merchandising, funeral services, and housing for the funeral director and their family—are immediately recognizable features of the American landscape, and yet the history of how these spaces emerged remains largely untold. In Preserved, Dean Lampros uses the history of this uniquely American architectural icon to explore the twentieth century's expanding consumer landscape and reveal how buildings can help construct identities. Across the United States, Lampros traces the funeral industry's early twentieth-century exodus from gloomy downtown undertaking parlors to outmoded Victorian houses in residential districts. As savvy retailers and accidental preservationists, funeral directors refashioned the interiors into sumptuous retail settings that stimulated consumer demand for luxury burial goods. These spaces allowed for more privacy and more parking, and they helped turn Americans away from traditional home funerals toward funeral homes instead. Moreover, by moving into neighborhoods that were once the domain of white elites, African American funeral directors uplifted their industry and altered the landscape of white supremacy. The funeral home has tracked major changes in American culture, including an increased reliance on the automobile and the rise of consumer culture. Preserved offers an in-depth cultural history of a space that is both instantly familiar and largely misunderstood.

A Companion to Popular Culture

A Companion to Popular Culture PDF Author: Gary Burns
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118883330
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 608

Book Description
A Companion to Popular Culture is a landmark survey of contemporary research in popular culture studies that offers a comprehensive and engaging introduction to the field. Includes over two dozen essays covering the spectrum of popular culture studies from food to folklore and from TV to technology Features contributions from established and up-and-coming scholars from a range of disciplines Offers a detailed history of the study of popular culture Balances new perspectives on the politics of culture with in-depth analysis of topics at the forefront of popular culture studies