CFP: Materializing Race in #VastEarlyAmerica

July 20, 2020 By The Junto Moderator in Calls for Papers, Conferences, Vast Early America Tags: Anthropology, archaeology, art history, artifacts, Black Atlantic, Call for Papers, colonial America, conferences, material culture, Native Americans, Public History, race, Slavery, social history, vastearlyamerica 1 Comment

Materializing Race: An Unconference on Objects and Identity in #VastEarlyAmerica
August 24 and 25, 2020
1 PM EST both days (Zoom)
Proposals due by August 1, 2020
Organized by Cynthia Chin and Philippe Halbert

In a commitment to fostering nuanced interpretations of early American objects and meaningful dialogue on historical constructions of race and their legacies, we propose a virtual ‘unconference’ to share and discuss scholarship on the intersections of identity and material culture in #VastEarlyAmerica. This participant-driven, lightning round-style event will be held via Zoom, with two approximately two-hour afternoon sessions conducted in English. Energized by Dr. Karin Wulf’s call for broader, more inclusive histories of early America, we seek to promote a diverse cross-section of scholarship focused on North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean before 1830.

We welcome a variety of approaches and methodologies including historical, art historical, anthropological, archaeological, visual analysis, and experimental/experiential archaeological. Proposals should be object-focused and include a brief abstract (250 words with one relevant image) for a 10-15-minute presentation, along with a short CV of no more than 2 pages. Potential questions and themes for presentations might include:

What is the next chapter in the discussion of race, ethnicity, identity, and early American material culture?
What are potential methodological approaches and revisions/additions to existing material culture frameworks? How can #VastEarlyAmerica work to expand the traditional American material culture canon?
What were some of the threads or outcomes of the 1619 Project dialogue (and other relevant publications/discussions) that relate/interact/tessellate with material culture studies? How can the 1619 Project and its surrounding narratives broaden the impact of material culture studies?
Can the outcomes or discussions surrounding this dialogue engender new approaches/methodologies and discussions in material culture studies? How might it affect the way we as historians and curators interact with and publicly present objects? Does it present the ability to see “legacy” objects and historical figures/narratives differently as a result?
Historians and material culture specialists as genealogists: how do our own personal family/ancestral narratives intersect with our study of early American history and material culture; the historian as biographer; the biographical object and the object biography
Public history: new thoughts on old things, from the exhibition and display of objects in museum settings to historical and character interpretation, to include historic trades and foodways
Object Case Studies: New interpretations of early American objects related to race, ethnicity, and identity
The influence of historical anniversaries and commemorations: Jamestown 2007, the New Orleans Tricentennial Commission, Plimoth Patuxet and Mayflower 400, the 500th anniversary of the Spanish invasion of Mexico in 2019 and the 2021 bicentennial of Mexican independence, etc.

This event is co-convened by Dr. Cynthia Chin (Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington) and Philippe Halbert (Yale History of Art). For more information, submission requirements, and audience registration details, please visit the Materializing Race website.

Guest Post: “Natives of the Woods of America”: Hunting Shirts, Backcountry Culture, and “Playing Indian” in the American Revolution

July 14, 2020 By The Junto Moderator in Guest Posts Tags: American Revolution, clothing, Continental Army, George Washington, material culture, Native Americans, Philip Deloria, Playing Indian, Rayna Green 4 Comments

Photograph in Charles Knowles Bolton, The Private Soldier Under Washington, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902, p. 162 and detail from The Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga, October 16, 1777, Yale University Art Gallery.

The following post is a guest post from Marta Olmos. Marta Olmos received her BA in History from Cornell University and her MLitt in Scottish History from the University of Glasgow. She works in public history and interpretation at Minute Man National Historic Park in Concord, MA. She is on Twitter @almostmartita

In her 1988 article Rayna Green said that “one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of American cultural expression… is a ‘performance’ I call ‘playing Indian.’” The Indian, in this context, is an amalgamation of white stereotypes of Native people, and the performance of “playing Indian” is carried out by white bodies, using the Indian to explore their own identities, fears, and cultures.[1] As the American Revolution dawned, the Indian was everywhere. Hunting shirts, the makeshift uniform of the Continental Army, were at the center of a movement around “playing Indian.” By exploring the discourse around the hunting shirt, and the performance of “playing Indian” that accompanied it, we can better understand the role of the Indian, and backcountry culture, in forging an early American military identity during the early 1770s.[2] Continue reading →

Early American Women Unmasked

May 5, 2020 By Philippe Halbert in Colonial Couture, Vast Early America Tags: Antigua, art history, Atlantic World, Black Atlantic, Caribbean, colonial America, Fashion, free people of color, Jamaica, Manners, Massachusetts, material culture, New England, race, Slavery, social history, vastearlyamerica, women's history 2 Comments

A special edition of #ColonialCouture, a Junto roundtable on fashion as history in early American life.

The Antigua-born Penelope Royall Vassall (masked and socially distanced), Joseph Blackburn, circa 1755, Massachusetts Historical Society

Protective face coverings have emerged as a potent, multifaceted metaphor for the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite inconsistent examples set by elected leaders and conflicting recommendations made by public health officials, unisex masks have steadily assumed a greater role in social distancing measures and become mandatory in certain settings outside the home. Options range from standard blue and white surgical masks to creative DIY improvisations and “Corona Couture.” Some museums are looking to add homemade masks to their collections as a way to document the crisis. Worn for slightly different reasons and more implicitly gendered, the masks owned by early American women and even children were no less symbolic in terms of practical use, commodification, or controversy.

Continue reading →

Q&A: Kate Egner Gruber, Curator of “Tenacity: Women in Jamestown and Early Virginia”

May 20, 2019 By Philippe Halbert in Interview, Uncategorized Tags: 17th Century, Archives, Atlantic World, Chesapeake, colonial America, Digital History, Exhibits, Gender, Jamestown, material culture, museums, Native Americans, Public History, race, Slavery, vastearlyamerica, Virginia, women's history 1 Comment

kateheadshot Today at The Junto, Philippe Halbert interviews Katherine Egner Gruber, who is Special Exhibition Curator at the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, a state agency that operates two living history museums in Virginia. This Q&A focuses on her most recent exhibition, Tenacity: Women in Jamestown and Early Virginia, which opened at Jamestown Settlement in November of 2018 and runs through January of 2020. She was also responsible for content oversight of the Yorktown American Revolution Museum‘s award-winning introductory film, Liberty Fever, and contributed to the development of new galleries that opened there in 2015. Kate earned a bachelor’s degree in historic preservation and classical humanities from the University of Mary Washington and a master’s degree in American history from the College of William and Mary. Continue reading →

CFP: The Fifteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Student Symposium

December 14, 2018 By The Junto Moderator in Calls for Papers, Conferences Tags: Art, art history, Borders, conferences, frontier, material culture, settler colonialism, vastearlyamerica, visual culture 1 Comment

Basket, American China Manufactory, Philadelphia, 1770–72 , soft-paste porcelain, Yale University Art Gallery.

Encounters, Entanglements, and Exchanges
Fifteenth Annual Yale American Art History Graduate Student Symposium
Yale University, New Haven, 6 April 2019
Proposals due by 1 February 2019

Points of encounter can occur across time and space. In colonial Mexico, blue and white earthenware vessels made in the city of Puebla responded to East Asian hard-paste porcelain. At the same time, ceramic manufacturers in China adapted designs that catered to pan-American tastes, and both John Bartlam’s South Carolina pottery and the American China Manufactory in Philadelphia produced their own soft-paste porcelain wares on the eve of the American Revolution. More recently, Carrie Mae Weems’s The Hampton Project reexamined a nineteenth-century vocational school that served as a cultural crossroads for formerly enslaved African Americans, American Indians, and white Americans to raise pressing questions of race, imperialism, and nationalism in the twenty-first century. These points of convergence between individuals, groups, places, and objects often instigate shifts in creative production with lasting and global resonances. The interaction of disparate cultures offers a rich nexus for artistic creation. Yet such encounters are also inseparable from the shifting dynamics of power that operate along gendered, racial, economic, and political lines. What can exchanges and entanglements reveal about the nature of encounter? How do encounters shape exchanges? In what ways do exchanges propagate new encounters?

The Fifteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Student Symposium invites papers that interrogate the dialectical relationship between encounter and exchange and explore the legacies of cultural intersection. We invite submissions that address art across North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean, that engage a range of critical perspectives, and that speak to a variety of time periods and artistic practices.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Micro-histories that address a specific instance of encounter
• Global encounters with the notion of ‘Americanness’
• Collaborations that problematize narratives of ‘influence’ across social, cultural, or political hierarchies
• Impact of religious proselytization and conversion in the arts
• Gift exchange, diplomacy, and trade
• Appropriation, fetishism, hybridity, and mimicry
• Contact zones, borderlands, intersectionality, and peripheries
• Power dynamics within systems of colonialism, racism, homophobia, or sexism
• Immigration, migrants, and refugees
• Authorship and ownership
• Tourism and travel narratives
• Activism, coalition building, and the arts
• Networks created via technology, globalization, and media

Interested participants are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 350 words along with a CV to americanist.symposium@gmail.com by 1 February 2019. Accepted participants will be notified in mid-February. Accommodations will be provided for all graduate student speakers in New Haven, Connecticut.

Guest Post: Fashion from Japan and France: Nightgowns in Colonial Brazil

October 8, 2018 By Philippe Halbert in Colonial Couture Tags: Atlantic World, Brazil, Fashion, History of Fashion, Latin America, material culture, Portugal, South America, vastearlyamerica Leave a comment

Le_diner._Les_dèlassemens_d'une_aprés_diner

Jean-Baptiste Debret, “Les dèlassemens d’une aprés diner,” from Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Brésil, vol. 2 (Paris: Firmin Didot Frerès, 1835)

Today’s guest post comes from Rachel Zimmerman (Ph.D., University of Delaware), Assistant Professor of Art History at Colorado State University-Pueblo. She has been studying the art and architecture of the Brazilian town of Minas Gerais since her first trip to the region in 2006. She began examining consumption in colonial Brazil for her dissertation, “Global Luxuries at Home: The Material Possessions of an Elite Family in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil,” and is continuing research for a book project on elite material culture in the city of Mariana. Follow her work here.

According to the early nineteenth-century English merchant John Luccock, it was customary for Brazilian men to discard stiff outer layers when at home and wear only a cotton shirt, often unbuttoned, knee-length breeches, and clogs.[1] Brazilian standards of decorum permitted informal dress in domestic settings, even when receiving guests. Examination of colonial-era probate inventories from Minas Gerais, the gold mining district, reveals that a small number of educated elite men transformed their state of undress from ordinary to stylish with the addition of a nightgown. Continue reading →

In Touch with the Dutch, or, Fashioning Colonial New York’s Merchant Elite

September 13, 2018 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables, Uncategorized Tags: colonial America, Dutch, Fashion, History of Fashion, Japan, material culture, New York, New York City 1 Comment

Man’s Gown. English. ca. 1700-1720. Gold silk damask (likely Chinese; ca. 1690-1720); lining: red brocaded silk (likely Persian; ca. 1700-1720); collar and cuffs: red silk damask (English; ca. 1700-1720); wool padding. Cora Ginsburg LLC.

Today’s #ColonialCouture post is by Cynthia Kok, a doctoral student in art history at Yale University. She is interested in trade and craftsmanship under European colonial governance and imitative material practices inspired by encounters with foreign cultures.

“I like my money right where I can see it…hanging in my closet.” –Carrie Bradshaw

Centuries before New York became known as a fashion capital— and Carrie Bradshaw emerged as a style icon— the city’s colonial-era merchants anticipated the words of Sex and the City’s lead character by investing newly earned wealth in clothing made from luxurious fabrics. And, like today’s Rich Kids of Instagram, they documented their exclusive material success through portraiture. Painted at the turn of the eighteenth century, that of Isaac de Peyster (1662-1728), the son of an affluent Dutch-American mercantile family, presented both his physical features and a luxurious silk robe patterned with rocks and spindly vegetation. The artist captured the soft, luminous sheen of the gold silk and hinted at the robe’s lining with a flash of red along an upturned sleeve. Continue reading →

Creole Comforts and French Connections: A Case Study in Caribbean Dress

September 11, 2018 By Philippe Halbert in Colonial Couture, Roundtables, Uncategorized Tags: Atlantic Creoles, Atlantic World, Caribbean, Colonial Couture, Fashion, French Atlantic, Haiti, History of Fashion, Louisiana, material culture, New Orleans, women, women's history 15 Comments

Today’s #ColonialCouture post is by Philippe Halbert. Follow him @plbhalbert.

“Vêtement dit à la creole,” Galerie des modes et costumes français, Charles Emmanuel Patas after Pierre Thomas Leclerc, 1779, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In 1779, a fashion plate depicting a woman’s garment “in the creole style” was published in Paris. Consisting of a lightweight muslin gown with wrist-length sleeves, the dress was “in the style of a chemise,” the basic female undergarment of the period.[1] Worn over a petticoat, the gown was to be pinned at the bust and loosely closed with a sash or belt. In addition to enumerating its various components, which included a separate caraco jacket, the engraving’s caption remarked that the fantastic ensemble was “of the sort worn by our French Ladies in America.” At the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, French colonial possessions in the Americas were largely confined to the Caribbean Basin, a region where interactions between people of indigenous, European, and African descent brought about innovations in everything from architecture to foodways. Although the inhabitants of French-controlled islands like Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue, or Haiti, were not beyond the reach of Parisian novelty, the heat and humidity necessitated certain sartorial adaptations. Continue reading →

Frogs and Cats, or, Access and Privilege

September 5, 2018 By Carla Cevasco in Academia, Opinion Tags: Geography, Jamestown, Job Market, material culture, research travel, resource access, sensory history, vastearlyamerica Leave a comment

I have never heard anything like those frogs. I was crunching along the gravel walkway from Historic Jamestowne back to the bus after the final reception of the Omohundro Institute conference in June. As I walked through the woods, the James River at my back, the calls of frogs and insects hammered at the air, drowning out the chatter of other attendees and the crunch of my own footsteps.

An hour before, I had gazed down into the archaeological dig of a kitchen site, in which researchers had discovered what they argue are cannibalized human remains in 2012. All the hairs on my neck stood up. Continue reading →

“A curious font of porphyry”

July 12, 2018 By Philippe Halbert in material culture, Research, Vast Early America Tags: 18th Century, Africa, Anglicanism, art history, Atlantic World, Canada, church history, colonial America, Early Canada, empire, French Atlantic, material culture, New England, New France, New Hampshire, religion, Seven Years' War Leave a comment

Screen Shot 2018-07-12 at 3.29.59 AM Working on material culture, my research has taken me to some interesting, if unexpected places. Last summer, it involved waiting outside Saint John’s Church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, founded in 1732 as the Anglican Queen’s Chapel. I quickly ran inside to snap some pictures of a baptismal font between back-to-back Sunday services. The Saint John’s font is an impressive fixture, carved from marble in a Continental European baroque style. As a ritual object used in the sacrament of baptism, the font is hardly unusual, but its story is. Continue reading →