Shackel returns to his theme of studying how consumerism acts on society in Harpers Ferry. In Culture Change and the New Technology, he analyzes consumer movements such as technology bringing mass produced ceramics and the idea of the Romantic consumerism (Shackel, 1996, pg. 23). Like in Annapolis, Harpers Ferry ceramic assemblages tell archaeologists about the availability of ceramics and the purchasing patterns of homeowners (pg. 119, 122). The Beckham and Moor households are both wealthy households that can afford wide assemblages of ceramics, but they differ in the variation of ceramics used for complex dining habits (pg. 122). This displays Shackel’s idea of social behaviors being reflected in material culture by the wide variety of ceramics …show more content…
used for different dining practices. For the idea of Romantic consumerism, Shackel introduces how the participation of a different gender can impact consumerism in families.
He cites middle class white women due to how they began to ritualize meals and how ceramic designs became more elaborate (pg. 174). Shackel again turns to the Beckham and Moor household ceramics in the amounts of fashionable goods found at the sites (174-175). This demonstrates the idea that material culture can represent the social activities of different genders.
Moving forward through time, Shackel places an emphasis on how historic sites relate to the social issues of the United States. He relates his theoretical idea of artifacts being symbolic of social hierarchies with how they are remembered in the present. Shackel mainly focuses on race and ethnicity with African American and Latino issues. Shackel addresses African American memory and social issues in his work at Harpers Ferry and Latino issues his work in Northeastern Pennsylvania that will be discussed in the next
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section. Another portion of Shackel’s work in parks is the idea of a created public memory that influences the interpretation of history. When discussing national parks, Shackel notes that there is a debate between whether the memory expressed by parks should related to social issues or nationalism (Shackel, 2003, pg. xv-xvi). Shackel’s Memory in Black and White explores the dynamics of racism in the United States. Shackel looks to Rebecca Kook’s study of how African Americans became from represented in the public memory of communities following the 1960’s Civil Rights movement (pg. 14). The public memory is how these communities view their own histories. Because of a change public memory related to African Americans, there was an increase of black history being taught in schools (pg. 15). The public in sense folded in black history back into the narratives of the United States’ past. Shackel had explained the concept of a created public memory in his book Archaeology and the Created Memory.
This memory can be based on individual or collective experiences and is a part of interpreting the past (Shackel, 2000, pg. 149). Shackel tells his readers to be mindful of how collective memory plays a part in shaping national histories (pg. 150). Shackel uses Harpers Ferry National Park as his example in this book because of how initially the memory of the park’s land was associated with its role in the Civil War, but does not approach race as explicitly. Early archaeologists fostered this myth by initially concentrating on excavating sites related to Harpers Ferry’s gun manufacturing industry (pg. 9). Additionally, William Hershey excavated around the Lockwood House to find outbuildings and graves related from the Civil War era (pg. 10). While Harpers Ferry has a prominent industrial history, it also provides archaeologists with materials that classify the wealth and health conditions of different classes in this society (pg.
13). During the time Shackel writes about Harpers Ferry, he brings up the idea of heritage management. Shackel analyzes the Laurajane Smith’s belief that archaeological theory lacks input from heritage management and archaeological knowledge from this management (Shackel, 2004, pg. 1). Shackel defines heritage as people’s shared value system related to the past preserved through individual or communal means (pg. 10). He believes that communities can use archaeology as a way to learn more about the diversity in the communities (pg. 8). But, heritage usually is related to dominant perspectives on history (pg. 11). Shackel encourages archaeologists that their research can empower groups outside of the dominant perspective (pg. 11). This sentiment is present in all his works related to civic engagement for the community benefit. Shackel acknowledges that the change in representation is likely due to the fact that a society’s current social and political views influence how people interpret the past (Shackel, 2003, pg. 21). Shackel notes that with this change came in Harpers Ferry by allowing archaeologists to examine antebellum and postbellum (before and after war) parts of the area (Shackel, 2000, pg. 9-12). He also mentions in an earlier work on culture in technology at Harpers Ferry that exhibits can also have agendas in the types of material culture expressed based on what was important in the past, what is meaningful in the present, and what will be taught in the future (Shackel, 1996, pg. 4). In his Harpers Ferry work, Shackel also outlines the community’s influence on the National Park Service’s activities there. With Teresa S. Moyer, Shackel addresses the issues within the National Park Service in how it underuses public engagement and tries to ‘freeze’ the park in the Civil War era (Moyer and Shackel, 2008, pg. 205). They consider Harpers Ferry to be an “‘open-air’ museum” that should benefit public and create dialogues about the past and future of the community (pg. 209). This perspective is based on the work of Museum Studies scholar, Stephen E. Weil. Specifically, they consulted his book Rethinking the Museum and Other Meditations and its message of museums being a service to society and empowering viewers to make judgments on the past and future (pg. 209). For the idea of time-freezing, Shackel and Moyer explain that in Harpers Ferry, research was mostly done to connect the site to the Civil War era (Moyer and Shackel, 2008, pg. 175). Shackel addresses this in Memory in Black and White as well. Because of this freezing, Harpers Ferry Center leaders felt that the park displays were static and not relatable to the park’s visitors (pg. 183). In order to be effective, parks should try to have a balance between the authenticity and the interpretative flexibility of displays so they are more useful to park visitors (pg. 195). As a whole, Shackel’s work at Harpers Ferry allows him to be more reflexive about the his utilization of interpretative theory. Through the knowledge of created public memories, he can keep in mind the multiple interpretations of sites throughout history. He acknowledges that social and political views in the present can affect how people interpret the past. And finally, in thinking about the public, he is mindful of their level of engagement with sites and how that affects their perception.
Breen and Innes' Myne Owne Ground is a book that seeks to address period in US history, according to the authors, an unusually level of freedom was achieved by formally bonded black Americans. As such, the book aims to bear witness to have faith in period of historical possibility, while locating this period, and its decline, firmly within the overall narrative of slavery. The authors claim that in order to do this, it is necessary to consider the lives of their subjects according to the understanding of freedom denoted by the period in question. Given this, any review of the book should focus on how it is able to provide a convincing description of what the authors term genuinely “multi-racial society,” together with the manner in which this
The American Civil war is considered to be one of the most defining moments in American history. It is the war that shaped the social, political and economic structure with a broader prospect of unifying the states and hence leading to this ideal nation of unified states as it is today. In the book “Confederates in the Attic”, the author Tony Horwitz gives an account of his year long exploration through the places where the U.S. Civil War was fought. He took his childhood interest in the Civil War to a new level by traveling around the South in search of Civil War relics, battle fields, and most importantly stories. The title “Confederates in the Attic”: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War carries two meanings in Tony Horwitz’s thoughtful and entertaining exploration of the role of the American Civil War in the modern world of the South. The first meaning alludes to Horwitz’s personal interest in the war. As the grandson of a Russian Jew, Horwitz was raised in the North but early in his childhood developed a fascination with the South’s myth and history. He tells readers that as a child he wrote about the war and even constructed a mural of significant battles in the attic of his own home. The second meaning refers to regional memory, the importance or lack thereof yet attached to this momentous national event. As Horwitz visits the sites throughout the South, he encounters unreconstructed rebels who still hold to outdated beliefs. He also meets groups of “re-enactors,” devotees who attempt to relive the experience of the soldier’s life and death. One of his most disheartening and yet unsurprising realizations is that attitudes towards the war divide along racial lines. Too many whites wrap the memory in nostalgia, refusing...
There are many contradictions pertaining to slavery, which lasted for approximately 245 years. In Woody Holton’s “Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era”, Holton points out the multiple instances where one would find discrepancies that lie in the interests of slaveowners, noble figures, and slaves that lived throughout the United States. Holton exemplifies this hostility in forms of documents that further specify and support his claim.
Writing around the same time period as Phillips, though from the obverse vantage, was Richard Wright. Wright’s essay, “The Inheritors of Slavery,” was not presented at the American Historical Society’s annual meeting. His piece is not festooned with foot-notes or carefully sourced. It was written only about a decade after Phillips’s, and meant to be published as a complement to a series of Farm Credit Administration photographs of black Americans. Wright was not an academic writing for an audience of his peers; he was a novelist acceding to a request from a publisher. His essay is naturally of a more literary bent than Phillips’s, and, because he was a black man writing ...
David W. Blight's book Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War, is an intriguing look back into the Civil War era which is very heavily studied but misunderstood according to Blight. Blight focuses on how memory shapes history Blight feels, while the Civil War accomplished it goal of abolishing slavery, it fell short of its ultimate potential to pave the way for equality. Blight attempts to prove that the Civil War does little to bring equality to blacks. This book is a composite of twelve essays which are spilt into three parts. The Preludes describe blacks during the era before the Civil War and their struggle to over come slavery and describes the causes, course and consequences of the war. Problems in Civil War memory describes black history and deals with how during and after the war Americans seemed to forget the true meaning of the war which was race. And the postludes describes some for the leaders of black society and how they are attempting to keep the memory and the real meaning of the Civil War alive and explains the purpose of studying historical memory.
In a lively account filled that is with personal accounts and the voices of people that were in the past left out of the historical armament, Ronald Takaki proffers us a new perspective of America’s envisioned past. Mr. Takaki confronts and disputes the Anglo-centric historical point of view. This dispute and confrontation is started in the within the seventeenth-century arrival of the colonists from England as witnessed by the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and the Wamapanoag Indians from the Massachusetts area. From there, Mr. Takaki turns our attention to several different cultures and how they had been affected by North America. The English colonists had brought the African people with force to the Atlantic coasts of America. The Irish women that sought to facilitate their need to work in factory settings and maids for our towns. The Chinese who migrated with ideas of a golden mountain and the Japanese who came and labored in the cane fields of Hawaii and on the farms of California. The Jewish people that fled from shtetls of Russia and created new urban communities here. The Latinos who crossed the border had come in search of the mythic and fabulous life El Norte.
When reading about the institution of slavery in the United States, it is easy to focus on life for the slaves on the plantations—the places where the millions of people purchased to serve as slaves in the United States lived, made families, and eventually died. Most of the information we seek is about what daily life was like for these people, and what went “wrong” in our country’s collective psyche that allowed us to normalize the practice of keeping human beings as property, no more or less valuable than the machines in the factories which bolstered industrialized economies at the time. Many of us want to find information that assuages our own personal feelings of discomfort or even guilt over the practice which kept Southern life moving
History has a strange way of coming back around when it comes to human civilization. It has been said repeatedly that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. However, just because there is a potential for danger in the future, this does not mean that humanity must ignore what once was. History is normally remembered through what is known as a memorial. When a memorial is put into a physical representation, it is then known as a monument.The need to memorialize events or people is complex; in some cases, monuments honor moments of great achievement, while in other cases, monuments pay homage to deep sacrifice. A monument's size, location, and materials are all considerations in planning and creating a memorial to the past. Examples of such feats are the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and even Mount Rushmore. For the latter of the
In Alice Walker’s story “Everyday Use,” symbolism, allegory, and myth stand out when thinking about the characters, setting, and conflict in the story. The conflict is between the mother and her two daughters (Maggie and Dee). There is also the conflict between the family’s heritage (symbolized by the quilt, bench, and butter chum) and their different ways of life. Dee chose a new African name, moved to the city, and adopted a new way of life while Maggie and her mother have stay behind. The quilt (the most important symbol) represents the family’s heritage in that it is made of scraps of clothing worn by generations of family members. The quilt has been sewn by family hands and used on family beds. It has seen history and is history. Maggie and her mother see that that history is alive but Dee thinks it is as dead as her name. Dee does not see that name as part of her heritage. By analyzing these symbols, a number of possibilities for a theme can be seen. Walker could be suggesting that to understand the African-American heritage, readers have to include the present as well as the past. However, the theme could be that poverty and a lack of sophistication and education cannot be equated with ignorance. Lastly, she could be telling her readers that dignity or self-respect rise from and are virtually connected to one’s entire heritage- not just a selected part of it.
Throughout Tony Horwitz’s novel Confederates in the Attic an overarching theme of Southern Pride occurs. Tony gets first-hand experiences of what southern heritage means through a cross-country road trip visiting historic sights and meeting locals. Tony meets people from every walk of life and is open to their stories and historical information. He meets people who have been oppressed and the oppressors themselves. Many people show their pride through commemorating the past, in the south this often means commemorating the Civil War. Pride is coupled with the ways men and women choose to honor the Civil War, and the rift it has caused within racial tensions.
The Rosewell Plantation in Gloucester County, Virginia was once the largest and most exceptional mansion ...
History is rich with culture and tradition. Culture and traditions greatly influence people’s behaviors, the way they perceive others, and the way they are perceived by others. Environment also plays into the development of culture and the decisions people make. Although each person has an individualized idea of what culture is and practices their own unique traditions, the fact remains true that every human being is subject to the effects of culture and tradition. Three classic authors accurately portray culture through setting and tradition in order to affect the reader’s view toward the characters and the authors themselves in Zora Neale Hurston’s “The Gilded Six-Bits”, Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”, and John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable.
In From Slavery to Freedom (2007), it was said that “the transition from slavery to freedom represents one of the major themes in the history of African Diaspora in the Americas” (para. 1). African American history plays an important role in American history not only because the Civil Rights Movement, but because of the strength and courage of Afro-Americans struggling to live a good life in America. Afro-Americans have been present in this country since the early 1600’s, and have been making history since. We as Americans have studied American history all throughout school, and took one Month out of the year to studied African American history. Of course we learn some things about the important people and events in African American history, but some of the most important things remain untold which will take more than a month to learn about.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is an independent government agency that tallies the number and type of museums in this country. By their count, there are 35,000 active museums, this represents a doubling of the number estimated in the 1990s (Ingraham 2014). Colorado has around 200 museums and five dedicated to African Americans (Visit Denver, 2016). The Black American West Museum started in the barbershop of the founder, Paul W. Stewart, out of his love childhood love for “Cowboys and Indians. Stewart moved to Denver as an adult and met his first real-life black cowboy, after being told there was no such thing as black cowboys. Exhibits at the museum include the history of miners, buffalo soldiers, pioneers, cowboys, early explorers,
History is a vast collection of stories and perspectives from the beginning of time to the present day. Many people have only cursory knowledge of history and some of its important turning points. Few people stop to think about the experiences of those who lived through that history and what it must have been like during that time. Even fewer may be aware that they may have ancestors who were a part of that history. Through the combined methods of formal genealogy and historical research it is possible to see one’s own past come alive. This paper examines the ancestry of the 21st century history student ad uncovers the connections to past events in North American history.