This innovative study draws on anthropology, archaeology, art history, folklore, and history to illuminate the rich texture of a historic landscape and the complex process by which it changed over a ninety-year period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Focusing on Franklin County in the upper Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, a landscape that shares many characteristics with greater New England and with the rural North, Garrison describes the region's town plans, agricultural patterns, dwellings, barns, outbuildings, fences, and transportation networks--and how they changed. He demonstrates that the transformation of this rural landscape was a dynamic process, a complex interaction between tradition and innovation, driven by people's shifting expectations about material life. Garrison's carefully researched, narrative study begins with the lives of individual inhabitants and from them generates a larger picture. Who lived in Franklin County, what they thought and wrote about, what choices they made and what principles they lived by, what buildings and crops they raised and with what tools and methods, how they organized their homes, family life, farms, and workspaces, what they did with their leisure time, how they spent their money or manifested their social status--these are the topics of his investigation. His study provides insight into the changing values that accompanied the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society and raises questions about the nature of tradition and the character of American -folklife.- The Author: J. Ritchie Garrison is associate director of the Museum Studies Program and assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware.

This book probes the materiality of Improvement in early 19th century rural Massachusetts. Improvement was a metaphor for human intervention in the dramatic changes taking place to the English speaking world in the 18th and 19th centuries as part of a transition to industrial capitalism. The meaning of Improvement vacillated between ideas of economic profit and human betterment, but in practice, Improvement relied on a broad assemblage of material things and spaces for coherence and enaction. Utilizing archaeological data from the home of a wealthy farmer in rural Western Massachusetts, as well as an analysis of early Republican agricultural publications, this book shows how Improvement’s twin meanings of profit and betterment unfolded unevenly across early 19th century New England. The Improvement movement in Massachusetts emerged at a time of great social instability, and served to ameliorate growing tensions between urban and rural socioeconomic life through a rationalization of space. Alongside this rationalization, Improvement also served to reshape rural landscapes in keeping with the social and economic processes of a modernizing global capitalism. But the contradictions inherent in such processes spurred and buttressed wealth inequality, ecological distress, and social dislocation.

The authors of this volume attempt to describe the relationship between history as a field of study and museums as vehicles for the presentation of historical discourse. The development of history museums, the way in which exhibits are created, the manner in which historians function in a museum setting, and the issues connected with the treatment of the history of specific sectors of our population are the themes addressed.

Winner, 2019 San Antonio Conservation Society Foundation Book Award, sponsored by the San Antonio Conservation Society Foundation German immigrants of the nineteenth century left a distinctive mark on the lifestyles and vernacular architecture of Texas. In this first comprehensive survey of the art and artifacts of German Texans, Kenneth Hafertepe explores how their material culture was influenced by their European roots, how it was adapted to everyday life in Texas, and how it changed over time—at different rates in different communities. The Material Culture of German Texans is about the struggle to become American while maintaining a distinctive cultural identity drawn from German heritage. Including materials from rural, small town, and urban settings, this masterful study covers pioneer generations in East Texas and the Hill Country, but also follows the story into the Victorian era and the early twentieth century. Houses and their furnishings, churches and cemeteries, breweries and businesses, and paintings and engravings fill the pages of this thorough, informative, and richly illustrated volume. Recent decades have seen a sharp increase of the study of vernacular architecture (which can range from traditional building to ethnic expressions to landscape ensembles) and an intensified study of American furniture and other decorative arts. Incorporating these vernacular and decorative arts methods and building on the works of cultural geographers, curators, and historians, The Material Culture of German Texans offers a definitive contribution that will inform visitors to the region as well as those who study its history and culture.

Offering an intervention into larger conversations about local history, microhistory, and historical scholarship, Entangled Lives is a revealing journey through early America.

As the editors note, "This volume includes many searching looks at the landscape, not just to understand ourselves, but to understand the context for other peoples' lives in other times, to unravel the landscapes they created and explain the meanings embedded in them.".