Elizabeth L. Block is an art historian and a Senior Editor in the Publications and Editorial Department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This interview is based on her new book, Beyond Vanity: The History and Power […]
material culture
The Author’s Corner with Elizabeth A. Athens
Elizabeth A. Athens is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Connecticut. This interview is based on her new book, William Bartram’s Visual Wonders: The Drawings of an American Naturalist (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024). JF: What led […]
The Author’s Corner with Jennifer M. Black
Jennifer M. Black is Associate Professor and Program Director of History at Misericordia University. This interview is based on her new book, Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). JF: What led you to […]
The Author’s Corner with Whitney Nell Stewart
Whitney Nell Stewart is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas. This interview is based on her new book, This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). JF: […]
Copper spoon found at Jamestown
This is a great little Facebook post from the Jamestown Rediscovery Project: What’s an archaeologist’s white whale? A copper alloy spoon, apparently! Director of Archaeology Dave Givens always wanted to find a copper spoon – it was one thing he […]
The Author’s Corner with Matthew Dennis
Matthew Dennis is Professor Emeritus of History and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. This interview is based on his new book, American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023). JF: What led you to […]
The Author’s Corner with Alison Bell
Alison Bell is Professor of Anthropology at Washington and Lee University. This interview is based on her new book, The Vital Dead: Making Meaning, Identity, and Community through Cemeteries (University of Tennessee Press, 2023). JF: What led you to write The Vital Dead? […]
Episode 97: “In Search of George Washington’s Hair”
Using America’s obsession with Washington’s hair as his window, historian Keith Beutler examines how “physicality,” or the use of the material objects, was the most important way early Americans (1790-1840)–museum founders, African Americans, evangelicals, and school teachers– remembered the nation’s […]
How Americans have remembered the July 1776 toppling of the George III statue in Bowling Green (Manhattan)
Wendy Bellion, an art historian at the University of Delaware, has an interesting piece at Smithsonian Magazine on the patriots’ toppling of this statue and a New York Historical Society exhibit on monuments. Here is a taste: A monument to […]