Preview the Forthcoming Issue – June 2025
This is a special issue organized and edited by Joan E. Cashin and Aliana E. Roberts “Material Culture in Nineteenth-Century America”
Introduction. War Objects: Material Culture and New Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America by Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts
Laura F. Edwards Trunks, “Legal Texts, and the Materiality of Law in the Nineteenth Century”
To say that everyone had a trunk in the nineteenth century is an overstatement, but only just. Even the enslaved and married women had trunks. Within those trunks were things that their owners called their property, which may seem odd, given that many of the trunks’ possessors did not have the rights considered necessary to own anything at all. As this article shows, trunks enabled legal claims to property and connections to place. Those principles, which were attached to the material world, existed alongside others that are more familiar to historians: those memorialized in writing and generated by legal professionals at various levels of government. While revealing the inseparability of law and material culture in the nineteenth century, trunks also trouble the conceptual distinction between the two in the historiography. It is now difficult to imagine trunks as legally resonant objects because of changes that severed law from material culture. Those changes, which began before the Civil War era, elevated legal texts over other material forms as the primary repositories of law. But the legal principles elaborated in those texts did not capture the full range of law. Notably absent were the legal principles attached to material objects, particularly trunks.
Amy Murrell Taylor “More Than a “Pile of Rude Boards”: Space, Power, and the Ordeal of a Schoolhouse in the Reconstruction South”
This article examines architecture as material culture by offering a biography of one Reconstruction-era structure—the Holley School building in Lottsburg, Virginia—charting its life from beginning to end, from the studs to the furnishings. It describes the building not as an empty vessel filled by the students and teachers, but as a structure that, with each alteration and with each material object placed inside, became deeply implicated in the contestation for social and political power in the rural South during Reconstruction. The Holley School building’s rise was in no way spontaneous or immediately achieved. Black residents of Lottsburg instead engaged in a hard-fought contest with white residents over land and costly supplies, over design, and over who, ultimately, would have control of the space over time. The article concludes that buildings like the Holley School—all the houses, churches, and schools built by freed communities during Reconstruction—should be understood as artifacts of a persistent struggle over material resources and the built environment that was at the heart of daily life in the rural South.
Roundtable Alaina E. Roberts, moderator, with panelists Julie Reed, Karen, Shade-Lanier, and Melissa Payne “We Are Cherokee”: Exhibiting Material Culture as an Act of Reconciliation
In this roundtable, convened by Dr. Alaina E. Roberts, historian Dr. Julie Reed and two Cherokee Nation employees, Melissa Payne and Karen Shade-Lanier, discuss the groundbreaking exhibit, “We Are Cherokee: Cherokee Freedmen and the Right to Citizenship.” One of the five Southeastern tribes to enslave Black women and men in the 1700s and 1800s, the Cherokees also spent decades after emancipation discriminating against their former slaves, eventually illegally disenfranchising them. “We Are Cherokee” is the first exhibit by the tribe to truly represent the humanity and marginalization of Black Cherokees. As such, the curation team faced issues around trust and transparency when soliciting objects, documents, and materials from the community for this show. The roundtable includes information about how the curation team overcame these obstacles and how they, along with tribal leadership, see the exhibit as one part of the Cherokee Nation’s effort to acknowledge its history and work toward full incorporation of the Black Cherokees the nation once rejected.
