Material Culture in the Classroom

As promised back in November, I am writing this month about using material culture in the U.S. history classroom. I’m going to use two needlework pieces in the collection at Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library as examples of how to go about reading objects as historical sources and giving a breakdown of what exactly material culture is all about.

A basic and all-encompassing definition of material culture is any three-dimensional object that has been made or manipulated by humans. This includes items such as furniture, houses, sculptures, and textiles. It can also be a landscape such as a formal garden, a city park, or a wildlife preserve. Letters, diaries, and other archival sources can also be studied as material culture.

To break down the reading of an object it is easiest to think about it on two levels: the material or physical level and the cultural level. It is that second level of cultural significance that separates some objects into material culture while excluding others. The cultural level is also what makes object study useful for understanding U.S. history.

Now let’s move to our first example:

Begin with the physical characteristics of the object:

What is it? A canvas work picture.
What is it made from? Wool and cotton.
What is its size and shape? Nearly square, 21.5″ x 24.5″
How is it made? Embroidered by hand.

Now fill in any other basic factual information (which sometimes requires a bit of archival work):

When was it made? 1852 (this one is easy since it is dated, many needlework pictures are)
Where was it made? Philadelphia, location of the Lombard Street School
Who made it? Olevia Rebecca Parker (easy again, it’s on the picture)
Does it depict an image? Yes, of two children carrying bundles of sticks and their dog, framed by a floral design.

Finally, how can this object give us insight into a culture? This is where the contextualizing and the real archival digging happens:

How does this object compare to other similar objects?
This is a pretty typical piece of schoolgirl embroidery that depicts a motif that was probably adapted from a print source such as a children’s magazine or a book. Floral designs were also very popular throughout the first half of the 1800s.

What other information can be found about the maker?
Now we get to the really fascinating part. Research into the Philadelphia records identifies Olevia (sometimes Olivia) Rebecca Parker as 14 years old when she made this picture in 1852. That fits with the idea that this was made as part of her education at the Lombard Street School. That school was located in Philadelphia near the intersections of Sixth and Lombard streets, and in 1828 it became a school for African American children. Yes, the maker of this picture was a black girl born free in Philadelphia. Following Parker through later census records reveals her eventual marriage to an African American dentist named Joseph Brister. Olevia and Joseph’s son, James Brister, became the first African American to earn a degree (dentistry, like his father) from the University of Pennsylvania.

Whoa! That is quite a history for a rather unassuming piece of embroidery! Here we have an object that can be used to teach students about several areas: the middle-class black community in antebellum Philadelphia, women’s education, African American education, the ubiquitous nature of whiteness in popular culture, etc.

And, as usual, the devil is in the details. Here is a photograph of the back of this picture:

Yes, that is the back. It is extremely neat. What would this tell us about the cultural values of Parker? She was taught to make this embroidery in school, but teachers saw it as an opportunity to educate beyond just the skill of stitching. Parker’s teacher taught her the importance of being frugal and tidy—important qualities in a good housewife. Everything about this picture aligns with the cult of domesticity, except that Parker was black and therefore excluded from the separate sphere of womanhood according to the rules of the white middle class. So what can this object tell us about the values of the black middle class? Why would those values be in line with white values? And what about African Americans of the working class, did they also teach these same cultural values to their children?

Now we come to our second example, a wonderful comparison to the first:

This is another canvas work picture in wool made by an African American schoolgirl. It depicts a pastoral scene of a mansion in the background, a farmhouse in the center, and a white woman with some animals (goats? dogs?) in the right foreground. Along the bottom is stitched: “Rachel Ann Lee Worked at the Sisters of Providence School Baltimore July 3 1846.”

Okay, different city and different school. The Oblate Sisters of Providence were the first sisterhood of Roman Catholics in the world started by women of African descent. They ran a school in Baltimore that was attended mostly by free black people in Baltimore. According to an advertisement from 1836 they educated their students to “either become mothers of families or household servants.”

The maker of this picture, Rachel Ann Lee, can be found in the 1845 census living with her mother and another female relative. Her mother’s occupation is listed as washerwoman. School records indicate that, in 1846, Lee’s mother paid two dollars for her to attend. That is a significant amount of money, particularly for a woman who appears from the census to be a single mother and only breadwinner of the household. Not to mention laundering was one of the most difficult, least desirable, and poorly paid occupations.

So, unlike Olevia Parker of Philadelphia, Rachel Lee of Baltimore does not appear to come from the middle class, but from the working class. Yet she is at a school learning similar skills to Parker and Lee’s mother has clearly invested a great deal in getting her daughter educated. Now we have an answer to the earlier question of middle class and working class values in urban free black communities during the late antebellum period.

These two objects certainly cannot produce completely definitive answers to all of our questions, but I find them useful in challenging my students’ perceptions about education, race, and womanhood in the early United States. I hope this very limited and simplified introduction to material culture encourages you to begin including some objects in your classroom!

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