Object Lessons
Object Lessons

Author: Sarah Anne Carter

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-07-12

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0190225041

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World examines the ways material things--objects and pictures--were used to reason about issues of morality, race, citizenship, and capitalism, as well as reality and representation, in the nineteenth-century United States. For modern scholars, an "object lesson" is simply a timeworn metaphor used to describe any sort of reasoning from concrete to abstract. But in the 1860s, object lessons were classroom exercises popular across the country. Object lessons helped children to learn about the world through their senses--touching and seeing rather than memorizing and repeating--leading to new modes of classifying and comprehending material evidence drawn from the close study of objects, pictures, and even people. In this book, Sarah Carter argues that object lessons taught Americans how to find and comprehend the information in things--from a type-metal fragment to a whalebone sample. Featuring over fifty images and a full-color insert, this book offers the object lesson as a new tool for contemporary scholars to interpret the meanings of nineteenth-century material, cultural, and intellectual life.

Object Lessons: And How to Give Them; Second Series for Intermediate and Grammar Schools (Classic Reprint)
Object Lessons: And How to Give Them; Second Series for Intermediate and Grammar Schools (Classic Reprint)

Author: George Ricks

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-07-07

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9781330856321

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Excerpt from Object Lessons: And How to Give Them; Second Series for Intermediate and Grammar Schools Our knowledge of the material world is obtained through the senses. The organs of sense are the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue and palate, and the nerves of touch located in the skin. The special nerves of these organs are acted on by things external to the body; the effect is conveyed to the brain; and mental impressions or ideas are the result. Thus a red colour acting on the retina, the sound from a whistle acting on the auditory nerves, or the smell of an onion on the olfactory nerves produces a definite mental impression. The five sensory organs, then, are so many doors and windows by which knowledge enters the mind. There is, however, another source of knowledge of material bodies. In this case the mental impressions are derived from within the body, and are due to muscular exertion. It is by muscular feeling that we estimate the amount of force required to overcome resistance. Thus we get ideas of elasticity and weight from the amount of active energy put forth by the muscles to overcome inertia in the one case and gravitation in the other. If a weight is placed in the hand we are conscious of a certain amount of force expended to keep it from falling; if the weight is increased we are conscious of an increased expenditure of muscular energy. The mental impressions, formed by and through the senses, including muscular feeling, are called sensations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.