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Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America

Online ISBN:
9780226059747
Print ISBN:
9780226059600
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America

Published online:
23 January 2014
Published in print:
2 September 2013
Online ISBN:
9780226059747
Print ISBN:
9780226059600
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

This book examines the range of things from the past that nineteenth-century Americans called relics—the objects and part objects that were collected solely because they had been associated with a prominent person or event. It argues that, although its premises were in many ways far removed from those of our own historical artifacts, the relic was nonetheless a coherent form of representation in its own right and embodied a historically specific vision about what things from the past meant. In attempting to recuperate the relic’s meanings, the book advances three main arguments. First, it argues that, however "primitive" or "superstitious" relics may appear to us, they were in fact an expression of the nineteenth century's new sense of the historical. They embodied a new consciousness of the gulf between past and present and of time as a unidirectional process. Second, unlike the twentieth century’s historical artifacts, the relic was modeled not on the scientific specimen but on a form that we may think of as entirely irrelevant to historical knowledge--the sentimental memento. Its purpose, that is, was not to provide objective knowledge about the past but to enable an affective connection with it. And, finally, the book argues that relics solicited a variety of investments that went far beyond the disinterested visual inspection promoted by professionalized museums. Ultimately relics were used not simply to represent the past but to rework it. They were material objects with which active psychic, political, and historical work could be done.

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