A Case for Objects: Material Culture in the History Classroom

Like all people in the past, we experience and shape the world not merely through our words but within particular historically situated material environments full of buildings, furniture, clothing, food, images, and thousands of other objects, remarkable and mundane. Every object has a history, with the potential of opening up new student perspectives on the past. In this module, Sarah Jones Weicksel provides an easy-to-use method and set of activities for exploring history through objects. She shows how using material culture can promote a collaborative, inclusive space for students to craft historical questions and consider how people in the past interacted with and were shaped by their material environments. The module introduces an “object analysis worksheet” to help students create a biography of a single object and ask historical questions about the object. It also provides a lesson plan that interweaves an array of objects, images, and texts as sources through which students can analyze northern civilian encounters with the American Civil War. A classroom activity using everyday “found objects” concludes the module, offering a way to introduce students to doing history through material culture.

Teaching Things

Staring down a pile of disposable coffee cup lids that my MA advisor, Katherine Grier, had unceremoniously dumped out of a tote bag and onto the polished wood seminar table in front of me, I wondered what, precisely, we were doing with these things. Just down the stairs and through security doors sat nearly ninety thousand objects dating from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century, displayed in the 175 rooms of the Winterthur Museum. And yet we weren’t looking at a William and Mary–style court cupboard, or a crock made by David Drake, an enslaved potter; nor were we examining a woman’s sewing table, a Hadley chest, or any other clearly “old”-looking object. Instead, we were sitting with a pile of (what most people would call) trash. But on that day, those lids weren’t trash, or even recyclable. They were one of the keys with which we began to unlock material culture methodology.

Over the last nearly twenty years, I have thought about those lids more often than one might imagine. Such lids all have the same basic function: to enable a person to take a beverage on the go while preventing the liquid from spilling. But when you look more closely, there are subtle differences in such an array of lids. Some have reclosable openings that instruct users to “lift”; others have a depression to collect liquid that might slosh from the cup. A range of symbols and numbers signify recycling codes, brands, and model numbers. Different words, some only in English, others in Spanish and French, all convey a similar warning: “caution contents hot.” Such close looking presents a range of detailed observations about design choices. For me, snapping one of those lids onto a cup of coffee still occasionally prompts a flash of an image embedded somewhere in my memory of those lids on the Winterthur seminar table.

One might stop there. But push a bit further to investigate the history behind this thing you think you know so well, and you’ll find that the 3.6-inch diameter of that black polystyrene lid with recycling code 6 also contains histories of an environmental movement, scientific discoveries, design, copyright law, lawsuits, labor, and globalization. Pushed further, the lid opens up questions about the long social, cultural, economic, and environmental histories of the production and consumption of the beverages most likely to be consumed while using the lids: hot tea and coffee. It might lead you to the history of the development of coffee plantation agriculture in El Salvador, to seventeenth-century London coffeehouses, to the various paths by which tea culture spread across Asia, or the long history of coffee’s medicinal uses.

Even something as mundane as a single-use beverage lid. And by employing such ordinary objects, every teacher can engage their students in learning history through material culture. No matter their level of access to museum collections or historic sites, they can equip their students with the skills to more broadly apply this method of exploring history.

The sense of unsettledness I felt when the coffee lids tumbled out of that tote bag is something I have gone on to replicate in my own classes and workshops. Sometimes with a disposable cup or lid, but also with a stereoscope and stereoviews of the 1862 Battle of Antietam, a miniature cast-iron cooking stove circa 1920, or an image like that of the 1870s cotton dress depicted on the cover of this issue of the American Historical Review.

These are all items that, at first, leave students perplexed. “What is this thing? How do I use this? Who wore this? What does this have to do with history?” To help students begin to answer their questions, I provide them with additional textual and visual sources that provide context and comparisons, offer advice on focusing the stereoscope to make the three-dimensional images pop, and give hints. Their challenge is to work together to analyze the sources, make an informed guess as to what the objects are, consider the different kinds of information the sources provide, and develop historical questions for further research. They are excited by this foray into something akin to aboveground archaeology. Students murmur among themselves as they attempt to solve the mysteries of these items—mysteries that are just enough to be exciting without causing frustration.

Students—and, indeed, most historians—are most familiar and comfortable with accessing and teaching history through texts. And yet we, like all people in the past, experience and shape the world not merely through our words but within particular historically situated material environments full of buildings, furniture, clothing, food, images, and thousands of other objects, remarkable and mundane. That material culture shaped the contours of daily life and the actions of historical actors. Textual sources are preserved in great numbers for many historical periods and often readily accessible through archives, but texts are only one way in which history can be uncovered—objects and images offer another window into the past, providing both context and new vantage points for exploring the history we teach. Those objects need focused attention in and of themselves.¹

Such an approach is far from new. Physical artifacts ranging from archaeological sites and pottery sherds to devotional objects and the materials on which texts are written have long informed the teaching and scholarship of historians of the ancient and premodern eras. Vibrant historical scholarship incorporating material culture-based research explores diverse geographies and time periods from the ancient world to the present. Nor is this a novel approach for historians working at historic sites and museums, where history is regularly interpreted amid and through the physical presence of the past.

Visitors to these historic sites and museums expect to encounter history through the material world. In fact, the public places a high level of trust in museums’ portrayal of the past. The American Historical Association’s 2021 National Endowment for the Humanities–supported survey, History, the Past, and Public Culture, corroborated other research, including Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s oft-cited data, that details the public’s engagement with history.² In the AHA survey, museums and historic sites were the most trusted sources for accurate accounts of history, outranking documentary films, college professors, nonfiction books, and high school teachers.

Why? In part, because of the objects themselves. People connect with history at museums—often through physical artifacts, and to a considerable extent because of those artifacts. The AHA’s survey results suggest a striking level of faith and engagement with the apparent authenticity of physical objects. As Peter Burkholder and Dana Schaffer write, “Objects in museums are perceived as not only representing history but being history. Those objects are thus assumed to be unbiased links to the past, which differentiates them from mere facsimiles of history such as researchers’ books and articles.”³ Mobilizing such faith in objects is critical to helping students (and the broader public) understand connections between past and present. For many museum visitors, objects make the past seem more tangible, more real, and this is among the reasons why they find objects so engaging. It is precisely that interest in tangible connections to the past that we can activate in the classroom by incorporating objects into our teaching.

My method for teaching with objects emerged out of a variety of personal experiences. Material culture had been my own academic lifeline—my way of navigating a challenging educational culture as a first-generation college student at Yale University. In my first year of courses, everyone seemed more widely read than I, more accustomed to analyzing the nuances of texts and drawing broader conclusions from them. But when I was standing in front of eighteenth-century furniture or analyzing the objects in one of Solomon D. Butcher’s photographs of Nebraska sod houses from the 1880s, it no longer mattered whether I had read Homer’s Iliad in a high school course.⁴ Much less that I had never read it in Greek, as had some of my classmates. Looking at furniture or people’s possessions in those photographs, we were all staring down a challenge: What did these things tell us about the past?

It was years later, when I was teaching my own college-level courses, that I finally named how material culture had enabled me to grow in confidence as a student and become the kind of historian I am today. Bringing material culture into the history classroom levels the playing field. Puzzling over material objects like that small cast-iron stove and stereoscope—things I bought in roadside antique stores—is an exercise that brings students together in an experience around a group of historical sources with which none of them have prior knowledge. Doing so helps to mitigate the disparity in skills and knowledge with which students enter the course; no one is already an “expert” in interpreting them. Teaching with objects is one way to set up a collaborative, inclusive learning environment in which the diversity of students’ observations, ideas, and questions is valuable.

Using material culture alongside other types of sources in the classroom offers students multiple points of access to history and requires them to engage a range of observational and interpretive skills. It also has the benefit of engaging students who have a broad range of interests, including nonmajors and students for whom a history course might at first feel like an unwelcome graduation requirement. Exploring the design and production of a piece of lathe-turned furniture can engage a student whose passion is engineering, while a student who wants to pursue a career in marketing and communications might connect to history through an exploration of the objects depicted in advertisements.

Many educators use objects or images in the classroom, but turning more focused attention to how we engage with material culture—and how we teach our students to engage with it—stands to augment all our learning experiences. If we view objects simply as illustrations or substitutes for texts, there is little value added by engaging in such an undertaking. But material artifacts are neither just engaging illustrations nor things that can be read in the same way or provide the same information as a text. Rather, they offer an alternative evidentiary means of approaching the past that transcends the domain of language. Material culture provides access to the past as it was experienced with all five of the senses—access to the palpable past that shaped the worldviews of historical actors. Objects, images, and texts provide different pieces to the same historical puzzle, interlocking to provide a clearer, more complete picture of history.

In the same way, teaching with material culture does not require replacing those more familiar textual sources with objects. It is not an either-or, or a competition over the best or the most reliable source. Rather, it is by intertwining the broad range of historical sources at our disposal—objects, images, documents, and more—and by reading those sources against one another that students arrive at synthetic understandings of the past.

Exercises in Close Looking

Every object has stories to reveal. But how do we help students unlock them?

The following classroom materials offer examples of adaptable activities that enable history instructors to engage students of all ages in exploring history through objects. These include an object analysis worksheet; a lesson plan that interweaves an array of objects, images, and texts as sources by which students analyze Northern civilians’ encounters with an American Civil War battle; and a “found objects” activity that can be used to introduce material culture into any classroom using everyday materials.

The Object Analysis Worksheet provides a useful starting point to engage students in the process of examining objects through a close looking exercise, helping them to identify the clues the objects offer, to ask questions based on those clues, and to pose their own questions for further exploration. It also requires students to flex their historical imagination as they work to make educated guesses based on their observations as to the answers to the questions.

The categories of questions on this Object Analysis Worksheet correspond roughly to what material culture scholars refer to as an “object biography”—the trajectory of an object’s existence beginning with its design and production, to its purchase or acquisition, to its use, repurposing, abandonment, destruction, or preservation. Identifying these details about an object’s life cycle prepares students to consider a final set of questions that help them move from the hypotheses developed through close looking to an understanding of the object as a source for posing broader historical questions. Central to the theoretical underpinnings of this approach is the notion that objects have different meanings to people depending on the stage in the object’s life cycle.⁵

This Object Analysis Worksheet is designed to help students determine which part of an object’s history most intrigues them. It can be used for any object to which students have physical access, one displayed in a museum, or an object depicted in an image or photograph. Depending on the chosen object and the amount of time available, instructors may wish to select only a few of the following questions. If the object has identifying information, instructors should not provide the information until after students have had an opportunity to look closely at the object and make their own observations.

Objects are valuable historical sources in and of themselves, offering information and prompting questions that other sources may not. But considering objects alongside other forms of historical evidence can lead to more robust interpretations of the past. “Interweaving Objects, Images, and Texts: Perspectives on the Battle of Antietam” is an example of this approach. In this lesson plan, students explore how Northern civilians encountered battlefield death through a range of objects, texts, and images during the American Civil War. Students work with a stereoscope, a photographic stereoview, Harper’s Weekly newspaper articles, personal correspondence, and additional materials to learn about the material objects in printing and photographic technology; how people acquired information in the mid-nineteenth-century United States; and how these objects, images, and texts shaped experiences of and attitudes toward the war. Images play a significant role in the lesson, but the objects are the key to interpreting them.

The Found Objects classroom activity is designed to be used with objects that can be easily found and handled by all instructors and their students. Such objects can be anything that one has on hand—ranging from a reusable water bottle or a disposable coffee cup to the classroom furniture. This activity is a means by which any teacher can bring the physical experience of working with material culture into their class, regardless of their access to historical collections. Using the Found Objects exercise in the classroom allows students to develop close looking skills that they can easily apply to the analysis of “older” objects. Practicing close looking with these “found objects” enables teachers to harness material culture’s capacity to help students investigate the things—and the histories—that they think they already know. All these materials are designed to guide students in the development of close looking skills and encourage them to make connections between lived experiences in past and present.

Object Analysis Worksheet

The Object Analysis Worksheet can be paired with the dress on the cover of the AHR. Both the raw material and the woven fabric of the circa 1870s cotton dress made in France were products of the intense work of agricultural laborers and people working in a textile manufactory. The lace would have been produced through a different process and by someone with a different skill set. The floral pattern itself depicts pink cornflowers, annual flowers native to Europe. The dress itself was a source of income for a dressmaker who would have cut and likely sewn the dress primarily by hand. Although sewing machines had been in regular use since the 1850s, the technology was not yet capable of such detailed work.

This dress would have been fit to a particular woman’s body before she would have worn it as a means of taking part in wealthy society. The fabric is gathered and draped into a bustle at the back of the dress, creating a silhouette that was popular in this period. This summer day dress would likely have been worn to social gatherings such as afternoon teas and receptions. Comparing this garment to other dresses, the undergarments that would have been worn to support it, and fashion plates from this period would provide additional context. Perhaps an unwieldy item for a descendant to store, the dress is now an art object at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and it is interpreted within the context of a resurgence of eighteenth-century style and the Romanticism of the impressionism movement.

Whether in the classroom or as part of my curatorial work, I always ask, of the many stories this object can tell, which story does it tell best? In part, the answer depends on the questions one asks of it. For me, a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, it is the choice of gauzy cotton fabric in a cornflower print that I find most intriguing, particularly given the shifting landscape of cotton production and consumption resulting from the American Civil War, a war whose origins were deeply entangled with the production of cotton using enslaved labor.

Interweaving Objects, Images, and Texts

Perspectives on the Battle of Antietam

 

Materials

• Piece of tree bark or wood

• Swatch of fabric

• Stereoscope (Can often be purchased at antique stores or may be available at local libraries. Reproductions are also available. If you are unable to acquire a stereoviewer, videos of their use may be available online.)

• Stereoviews (The stereoview in this lesson plan can be printed to size and glued to cardboard. Some stereoviews have an image on the front and text on the back. Both should be provided to students.)

• Optional: Print issue of Harper’s Weekly (Reproduction issues are available online. Many libraries have issues of the newspaper in their collections.)

• Optional: Blocks of wood and carving tools

Assigned Reading (Optional)

•  Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008), chap. 1.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the session, students will:

• Be able to analyze different types of historical sources and identify their various perspectives and purposes

• Be able to explain how physical aspects of woodcut engraving and photographic processes affected the appearance of newspaper illustrations and photographs

• Develop skills in working with material objects as sources and subjects of historical research

• Be able to explain the ways in which Northern civilians learned about the Battle of Antietam and develop hypotheses about how this information affected their attitudes toward war

• Be able to articulate how the historical methods used in the lesson help historians write nuanced accounts of a particular event

The following materials include images and descriptions of battlefield death. Instructors should determine the appropriateness of this material for their students. Should an instructor wish to use alternative images, additional materials are available on the AHA’s Teaching Things site. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division has a large holding of stereoviews that can be printed to size.⁶

Introduction

The Battle of Antietam, fought in Maryland in September 1862, was the single deadliest day of the American Civil War, with more than twenty-two thousand casualties. In its aftermath, Northern civilians encountered the battle through a range of images, texts, and material culture. Relics of the battlefield, such as bits of men’s uniforms and pieces of tree bark, were taken by soldiers who sometimes stashed these items in their knapsacks, but also sent them home in envelopes and packages, accompanied by letters describing their involvement in or experience of the battle. People read newspaper articles describing and commenting on the battle. They encountered images of both the landscape and death through sketches, engravings, stereoviews, and, in New York City, a photographic exhibition.

Students can be divided into groups of three to four for this activity. As students work through the following sources, they should consider each item individually and then think about them in the context of one another, asking what these sources tell us about this particular historical moment.

Tools and Techniques

The Material Culture of Print Technology

In this section, students are introduced to the material culture of 1860s print technology, including photography, newspaper production, sketch artistry, and the preparation of illustrations from photographs for newspaper publication. If appropriate, instructors may use pieces of wood and small carving tools to allow students to try carving an image. Doing so helps students to understand the limitations of illustration technology and its effects on the images encountered by the public. For classes that are not exploring battlefield death, this section can also be taught separately.

During the Civil War, images printed in newspapers were produced using woodblocks like the one depicted here. Once an image was selected for engraving, an artist traced and/or reworked the original image on a sheet of paper. This outlined drawing was then rubbed onto a polished and lightly whitewashed plank of Turkish boxwood so that the transferred lines could be easily seen.⁷ If the engraving was for a large image, such as the centerfold of a newspaper, the plank would be composed of multiple blocks of wood.

After the image was transferred, several engravers worked on the individual block sections, which were screwed together before being finished by an engraver who smoothed out the image where the blocks were joined. Students should be asked to identify the outlines of individual blocks used to produce the image, as well as the location of the screws holding the blocks together (along the bottom edge). Have them reflect on what it would have been like to create this woodblock engraving.

Both sketch artists and photographers traveled with Civil War armies, often documenting camp life and the aftermath of battles. Newspaper engravings were often based on photographs, textual descriptions, or the work of sketch artists, the latter of whom may or may not have witnessed the events they depicted. Photographs themselves were not reprinted in newspapers until the 1880s. The images people encountered in newspapers, then, were shaped by the limitations of the material culture of print technology. The physical properties of wood and metal engraving tools could not achieve the same level of detail as could be captured in photographs.

Consider the Harper’s Weekly newspaper as a text, image, and object—something that a person physically holds in their hands and pages through.

• How is this experience different from and the same as the ways in which you typically consume media?

Examine the Harper’s Weekly image of soldiers awaiting burial after the Battle of Antietam and then read the accompanying October 18, 1862, article entitled “The Battle of Antietam.” After practicing close looking and reading, answer the follow questions:

• How do the descriptions of the illustrations in the newspaper differ from your own viewing of those illustrations?

• What reaction might readers have had to these scenes?

Experiencing Stereoviews

Before there was VR, there was the View-Master. And before that: the stereoscope. Popularized in the 1850s, stereoviews and the typically handheld device by which to view them were a popular parlor pastime. Taken using a special camera with two lenses, two nearly identical images printed on a stereoview card merged into a three-dimensional picture when viewed through a stereoscope. The subject matter ranged from comical scenes to historic sites to Civil War battlefields. One might view the images by oneself, but more frequently, the stereoscope was passed from person to person, and the image became an object of conversation.⁸ Viewing stereoviews was—and is—an embodied experience that involved handling a physical object and adjusting the stereoview’s distance from the stereoscope’s lenses to achieve a three-dimensional effect. The images themselves allowed viewers to “travel” to new and distant places from their seats around a parlor table.

Have students handle the stereoscope, view the image through its lenses, and discuss the following questions:

• Consider the physical experience of holding and using a stereoscope. Is it heavy? How do you need to adjust your body to make viewing the image easier? Is it difficult to make the image pop into 3-D?

• What appeal would stereoviews have held for Americans in the mid-nineteenth century?

• How does the experience of looking at the stereoviews through the stereoscope compare to that of looking at the stereoviews with the naked eye?

• What is conveyed differently and the same in the newspaper illustration and the stereoviews? What might explain these differences (e.g., production techniques, social/cultural reasons, or the role of newspapers)?

• How might the experience of viewing battlefield death through these different formats have shaped the ways in which the viewers thought about the battle, the war, or death?

Photographs in the Built Environment

The Civil War was the first prolonged conflict in the United States to be extensively photographed. Dozens of photographers—some working for the government, others as private citizens—traveled with the US and Confederate armies. These photographers employed a wet collodion process that required five to twenty seconds of exposure.⁹ As a result, clear action shots could not be captured by this technology. Instead, many photographers walked the battlefield in its wake, documenting its death, destruction, and landscapes.

Three weeks after the Battle of Antietam, as the wounded recovered in hospitals and civilians anxiously searched for family members’ names on casualty lists, Mathew Brady’s Photographic Gallery in New York City opened an exhibition of “The Dead at Antietam.” In this gallery, visitors could view and purchase wartime photography.¹⁰

Have students consider the woodcut engraving of Mathew Brady’s Photographic Gallery. Although this particular image does not depict the Antietam exhibition, it provides evidence of the physical space of the gallery.

• Observe the material objects in the gallery as well as its layout and visitors. What does the image tell us about how a person would have viewed those photographs?

• How might viewing photographs in the gallery differ from viewing them at home? How did the physical and social experiences differ?

Next, have students read the excerpt from the October 20, 1862, New York Times article entitled “Brady’s Photographs: Pictures of the Dead at Antietam.”

• How would encountering photographs of battlefield death at Brady’s Gallery have differed from viewing them as stereoviews at home or in newspapers?

• What might it have been like to view these photographs in the presence of other people, many of whom may have been strangers?

• Based on the newspaper account and images, how do you think viewing these images would have affected Northern civilians’ understanding of war? Would it have ignited people’s support for the war?

Objects from the Battlefield

Many civilians—Northerners and Southerners—received their news of the war from family members and friends who were fighting in the armies. In those letters, as well as packages, were mementos from the battlefield too. The vast number of material objects littering the field after a battle could be staggering: clothing, hats, boots, knapsacks, caissons, rifles, letters, buttons, exploded shells, splintered wagons. The pockets and gear of the dead and wounded, too, were filled with objects: letters, pocket Bibles, clothing, photographs, pencils, stamps, pipes.

In the immediate aftermath of a battle, both civilians and soldiers tramped through the field, picking up objects that littered the field. The items they took for themselves or to send to friends and family at home ranged from torn flags, bullets, and artillery shells, to canteens, cartes de visite, and pocket diaries. They also chopped up trees to obtain pocket-size pieces of wood in which bullets were embedded, and took pieces of bridges, like Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam, and other structures. Such relic hunting continued throughout the war and beyond. Indeed, museum collections are filled with items collected immediately after the battle and by relic hunters in the early twentieth century. Yet soldiers also rifled through the pockets of the dead and dying, some looking for objects of value, others for better clothing with which to supply themselves. At Antietam, a small mahogany inkstand was taken from the pocket of a soldier whose body was disinterred shortly after the battle.¹¹ A rectangular piece of wood nearly eight inches long and two inches wide with a bullet embedded in it was cut from the Dunkard Church Woods on the Antietam battlefield and its edges smoothed.¹²

Surgeon William Child sent from Antietam to his wife in New Hampshire a letter in which he also enclosed “a bit of gold lace such as the rebel officers have.” This uniform trimming was not found lying on the battlefield. Rather, Child explains that “I cut [it] from a rebel officers coat on the battlefield.” He does not specify whether the coat was still on the body of a dead officer, but such an act would not have been uncommon. There was an important distinction between the act of picking up items from the ground and searching dead and dying men’s pockets. Items picked up from the battlefield after bodies had been removed and buried were items that were divorced from the men themselves; to take something directly from a dead body, on the other hand, was a far more physical experience and violating.¹³

Ask students to read William Child’s September 22, 1862, letter written to his wife from the battlefield hospital near Sharpsburg, Maryland.

• How does Child’s firsthand account of the battle differ from the description in the Harper’s Weekly article?

• What emotions might handling a piece of a Confederate officer’s uniform trimmings have evoked for Mrs. Child, whose husband was a US officer?

Have students handle a modern swatch of fabric or a piece of tree bark. Imagine the experience of opening up a package to find something that the letter writer had taken from the battlefield.

• How might this feel for the person at home?

• Would it have made the battle seem more real?

• Would it have helped them feel more connected to the letter writer? Why or why not?

When students have completed the close-looking and analysis exercises, the following questions can be used to guide a full-class discussion about the broader implications of the sources with which they have engaged:

• How did Americans’ encounters with the war differ depending on their proximity to the battlefield?

• How was the experience of viewing a photograph versus a stereoview versus a newspaper illustration different and the same?

• In what ways do personal letters about the battle differ from newspaper accounts? What information was lost or added? Why?

• Who claimed to have the authority to relate the experience of war, and on what basis?

• How might these objects, images, and texts have shaped people’s attitudes toward war? Where could we look for more information to test our hypotheses?

At the conclusion of the lesson, students should have developed an understanding of the Civil War as an event experienced in the material, physical world by not only soldiers but also civilians. Holding a stereoscope to look at three-dimensional stereoviews, handling relics from the battlefield, and encountering graphic images of death and dying had emotional effects on people and influenced how they read newspaper accounts and letters from the battlefront. Students should also reflect on what they learned about historical methods while participating in these activities. They should be able to articulate that using multiple kinds of sources helps historians develop a nuanced and layered account of the Battle of Antietam.

Additional Reading

• Barnett, Teresa. Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

• Brown, Joshua. Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

• Cashin, Joan, editor. War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

• Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2008.

• Gardner, Alexander. Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War. New York: Dover, 1959.

• Weicksel, Sarah Jones. “‘Peeled’ Bodies, Pillaged Homes: Looting and Material Culture in the American Civil War Era.” In Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement, edited by Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra, 111–38. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.

Doing History with Found Objects

Materials

• Readily accessible object, such as:

  • Disposable hot-beverage lid

  • Disposable water bottle

  • Reusable travel mug or water bottle

  • Food packaging

• Paper and pencil for sketching

Students should begin by describing their chosen object, making a rough sketch of it, and labeling its various components and inscriptions. They should also take note of the object’s physical characteristics, such as its measurements, weight, texture, and materials; its smell; the sounds it makes; and, if applicable, its taste.

In the case of a Solo brand disposable hot-beverage lid, students will quickly observe that it is made from plastic, mass-produced, and will attach to and cover a cup and enable a person to drink from it. They will readily note words and symbols imprinted on the lid. They might hazard a guess that it is made through a molding process, and they would be correct. The challenge, then, is to push students beyond these direct observations to ask questions with increasing levels of complexity that lead them to posing historical questions.

Many students will readily identify the universal recycling symbol of three chasing arrows; some might note that the inclusion of a 6 and PS identify the lid as polystyrene. But why is the recycling symbol on the lid? How did it come into existence? What, in other words, is the history behind its development, use, and persistence? Further exploration of this symbol can lead students to the history of the US and international environmental movements.

Disposable lids are so ubiquitous that their function in US culture seems unremarkable. And yet people have not always used plastic disposable drinkware. What social and cultural circumstances prompted its development? Why, in other words, did people require a lid that would allow them to both drink from a cup and minimize spillage? Was it quickly embraced? What did people use before its invention?

Students might also analyze a food package. After identifying the range of words, symbols, colors, and materials and making additional observations, students should be asked to dig deeper, to question what they think they know. Is the package intended to appeal to a certain age or type of consumer? On what information is their hypothesis based (the colors used in the design or logo, for instance)? What symbols does the packaging include, and why? For instance, does it contain a pareve, kosher, halal, or gluten-free symbol? With whom are these symbols intended to communicate? What does the packaging suggest about the conditions under which food is produced and/or packaged? What is the history behind the development of the nutrition facts label?

An instructor can use these exercises as an entry point for engaging students in a larger historical theme or event. Once they have analyzed and considered the object, students can engage with additional objects for comparison, or work with additional sources that can help them piece together the broader history of which the object is a part. Historical questions posed of the hot-beverage lid might serve as a jumping-off point for a cultural history of coffee and/or tea consumption or the globalization of trade. Food packaging might lead, for example, to histories of health, immigration, and religious life. Either object might prompt an exploration of the history of disposability, waste practices, or environmental history, among other topics. Advanced Placement US history teachers, for instance, might address topics on work, exchange, and technology; migration and settlement; or American and regional culture.

Students can be asked to reflect on how ubiquitous these objects are in their daily lives and reminded that many of the things we view in museums were once part of the daily lives of people in the past—the things through which they conducted their social lives, the objects of their labor, the things that made their houses feel like their own. And while dresses like that on the journal’s cover are now displayed on forms in museum collections for only a few months at a time to prevent fading; are often housed in acid-free tissue and boxes, the garments’ folds supported by padding to prevent splits in the fabric; and examined using cotton gloves to prevent the oils from our hands from degrading the fabric, they were once worn outside on dirty streets, while eating food and drink, and spot cleaned only occasionally.

Note: An alternate version of this exercise comparing modern and ancient food packaging is available in the Teaching Things resources on the AHA’s website.

Supplementary data

A copy of the Object Analysis Worksheet is available to download with the online version of this module.

Image Credits

Frontis (left to right, top to bottom). Chest, John Rockwell, 1640-1660, Yale University Art Gallery, Acc. No. 1930.2262; dress, 1822–25, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. No. C.I.56.20; terracotta amphora, third century CE, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. No. 74.51.392; dress, 1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. No.2003.426a, b.; terracotta amphora, first century BCE, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. No. 74.51.384; teapot, 1766–75, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. No. 27.232a, b; dress, 1862–66, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. No. C.I.40.10.2; waistcoat, 1615–20, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. No. 23.170.1; dress, ca. 1820, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. No. 1979.346.204; chest of drawers, Peter Blin, 1675-1700, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. No. 66.190.1.

Fig. 1: Solomon D. Butcher, Sylvester Rawding Family in front of Sod House, North of Sargent, Custer County, Nebraska, 1886, photograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photograph Division, Washington D.C. https://www.loc.gov/item/2005693378/.

Fig. 4: Dress, 1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. No.2003.426a, b.

Fig. 5: Back of a block, showing how it is fastened together, in “How Illustrated Newspapers are Made,” Frank Leslie’ s Illustrated Newspaper, August 2, 1856. https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3c21643/.

Fig. 6: Printing Block from a sketch by Arthur Lumley, “Camp of the 1st District Volunteers (Colored) on Mason’s Island, Opposite Georgetown, D.C,” New York Illustrated News, July 4, 1863. National Museum of American History, Acc. No. 1973.305359. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_805141

Fig. 9: Alexander Gardner, Photographic Incidents of the War, No. 557, Gathered Together for Burial, after the Battle of Antietam, 1862. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., Call No. LOT 13580, no. 3 [P&P]. https://loc.gov/item/2011648595.

Fig. 10: M. B. Brady’s new photographic gallery, corner of Broadway and Tenth Street, New York, 1861. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., Illus. in AP2.L52 Case Y [P&P] http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95508946/.

The author thanks the National Endowment for the Humanities for its support of Teaching Things. She thanks AHA resource developers Krista Grensavitch, Corinne Kannenberg, Brandon M. Schechter, and Katie C. Knowles, and contributors Machal Gradoz, and Caitlin Monroe for their work on this project.

Author Biography

Sarah Jones Weicksel, PhD, is the director of research and publications at the American Historical Association and the project director for Teaching Things: Material Culture in the History Classroom. Weicksel is the author of several articles on material culture and the American Civil War era and is a research associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.