Relic Hunters
Relic Hunters

Author: James E. Snead

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-08-30

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0192508423

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Relic Hunters is a study of the complex relationship between the people of 19th century America with the material antiquities of North America's indigenous past. As scholars struggled to explain their existence, farmers in Ohio were plowing up arrowheads, building their houses atop burial mounds, and developing their own ideas about antiquity. They experienced the new country as a "place with history" reflected in material traces that became important touch points for scientific knowledge, but for American cultural identity as well. Relic Hunters traces the encounter with American antiquities from 1812 to 1879. This encompasses the period when archaeology took root in the United States: it also spans the "deep settlement" of the Midwest and sectional strife both before and after the Civil War. At the center of the story is the first iconic find of American archaeology, known as "the Kentucky Mummy." Discovered deep in a cavern, this dessicated burial became the subject of scholarly competition, traveling exhibitions, and even poetry. The book uses the theme of the Kentucky Mummy to structure the broader story of the public and American antiquities, a tour that leads through rural museums, mound excavations, lecture tours, shady deals, and ultimately into the famous attic of the Smithsonian Institution. Ultimately, Relic Hunters is a story of the American landscape, and of the role of archaeology in shaping that place. Derived from letters, memoranda, and reports found in more than a dozen archives, this is a unique account of a critical encounter that shaped local and national identity in ways that are only now being explored.

E Pluribus Barnum
E Pluribus Barnum

Author: Bluford Adams

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9780816626311

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The first book to consider the career of P. T. Barnum from a cultural studies perspective. Phineas Taylor Barnum lived from 1810 until 1891, and in the eighty-one years of his life he created show business as we know it. In E Pluribus Barnum, Bluford Adams investigates the influence Barnum had on American popular culture of the nineteenth century, and expands our understanding of the ways he continues to influence us today. Beginning with a discussion of Barnum's early shows, Adams demonstrates the dynamic interplay between Barnum's increasingly "respectable" aspirations for his entertainments and his active cultivation of middle-class sensibilities in his audiences. In his discussion of the 1850-51 concert tour of the "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind, Adams explores the role played by women's rights and class issues in Barnum's management of these concerts. Barnum's American Museum and the "moral dramas" presented in its theater are examined, as well as the later circuses. Adams relates the rise of Barnum to the emergence of a new U.S. society, one riven by conflicts over slavery, feminism, immigration, and capitalism, and considers his career as a crucial moment in the on-going struggle over the politics of U.S. commercial entertainments.

Cabinets of Curiosities
Cabinets of Curiosities

Author: Joseph R. Goldyne

Publisher: Chazen Museum of Art

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13:

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Four Wisconsin artists, Martha Glowacki, Mark Lorenzi, Natasha Nicholson, and Mary Alice Wimmer, are passionate collectors who use objects from their own collections to inform their individual artwork. This catalog documents an installation by each of the four artists that is reminiscent of the 16th- and 17th- century Wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonders, private collections of natural and man-made objects. Distributed for the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Killer Colt
Killer Colt

Author: Harold Schechter

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2024-04-02

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1504094263

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An in-the-room account of John Colt’s scandalous nineteenth-century murder trial from “America’s principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers” (Boston Review). In this masterful account, renowned true-crime historian Harold Schechter takes you into the life and crimes of convicted murderer John Caldwell Colt, drawing parallels between John’s rise to notoriety and his brother Samuel Colt’s rise to fame as the inventor of the legendary revolver. With a killing that made headlines around the nation, John Colt became a cultural touchstone whose shocking villainy inspired and provoked such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville. Unlike his brother, John lived a nomadic existence, bouncing from one job to another. His one distinction, writing a reference accounting book, would play a part in his fall from grace. For in New York City, on September 17, 1841, John murdered printer Samuel Adams with a hatchet during a heated argument over proceeds from book sales. A media circus ensued, galvanizing the penny press, which printed lurid headlines and gruesome woodcut illustrations. The standing-room-only trial created unforgettable moments in legal history, including such dramatic evidence as Samuel Adams’s decomposed head. The verdict and its aftermath would reverberate throughout the country and beyond, giving John Colt lasting infamy. “[Schechter] leads us through Colt’s trial with such precision that you can smell the cigar smoke in the courtroom. . . . Killer Colt succeeds in making us care about this story now by showing why it mattered to so many people then.” —HistoryNet

Rookwood and the American Indian
Rookwood and the American Indian

Author: Anita J. Ellis

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0821417398

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The nation's premier private collection of Rookwood art pottery featuring American Indian portraiture is on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum from October 2007 to January 2008. Rookwood and the American Indian: Masterpieces of American Art Pottery from the James J. Gardner Collection is a remarkable exhibition catalogue that will be of interest well beyond the exhibition because of its unique subject matter. Fifty-two pieces produced by the Rookwood Pottery Company are showcased, many accompanied by black-and-white photographs of the American Indians portrayed by the ceramic artist. In addition, the catalogue includes a brief biography of each artist as well as curators' comments about the Rookwood pottery and the Indian apparel seen in the portraits. The catalogue also presents two essays. The first, "Enduring Encounters: Cincinnatians and American Indians to 1900," by ethnologist and co-curator Susan Labry Meyn, describes American Indian activities in Cincinnati from the time of the first settlers to 1900 and relates these events to national policy, such as the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Rookwood and the American Indian, by art historian Anita J. Ellis, concentrates on Rookwood's fascination with the American Indian and the economic implications of producing that line. Rookwood and the American Indian blends anthropology with art history to reveal the relationships between the white settlers and the Native Americans in general, between Cincinnati and the American Indian in particular, and ultimately between Rookwood artists and their Indian friends.

American Antiquities
American Antiquities

Author: Terry A. Barnhart

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 597

ISBN-13: 0803284292

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Writing the history of American archaeology, especially concerning eighteenth and nineteenth-century arguments, is not always as straightforward or simple as it might seem. Archaeology's trajectory from an avocation, to a semi-profession, to a specialized, self-conscious profession was anything but a linear progression. The development of American archaeology was an organic and untidy process, which emerged from the intellectual tradition of antiquarianism and closely allied itself with the natural sciences throughout the nineteenth century--especially geology and the debate about the origins and identity of indigenous mound-building cultures of the eastern United States. Terry A. Barnhart examines how American archaeology developed within an eclectic set of interests and equally varied settings. He argues that fundamental problems are deeply embedded in secondary literature relating to the nineteenth-century debate about "Mound Builders" and "American Indians." Some issues are perceptual, others contextual, and still others basic errors of fact. Adding to the problem are semantic and contextual considerations arising from the accommodating, indiscriminate, and problematic use of the term "race" as a synonym for tribe, nation, and race proper--a concept and construct that does not, in all instances, translate into current understandings and usages. American Antiquities uses this early discourse on the mounds to frame perennial anthropological problems relating to human origins and antiquity in North America.