Generally individuals in history are known for a particular reason - they somehow influenced history. Very little is known about the ordinary person who lived in the past. But historical archaeologists - through their interpretation of the material culture and historic record - can study the past on an individual level. This brings archaeological interpretation from a micro to a macro level - as opposed to the traditional level of society to community to individual interpretation. The cases presented in this volume engage material culture that is owned or used by a single person and is thus associated with an individual at some point in its uselife. The volume takes bodkins, shoes, beads, cloth, religious items, grave goods, as well as subassemblages from well-defined contexts from New England, the Chesapeake, New Orleans, Hawaii, Spanish colonial America, and London in the pursuit of the individual and the textured interpretation this analytical scale provides. This volume promises to present innovative approaches to a host of archaeological materials, drawing widely on the range of archaeological research for the historical period today. Capitalizing on several topics and research threads with great currency, such as the examination of material culture and interest in various and intersecting lines of identity construction, as well as presenting an international and multiregional approach to these topics, this volume will be of interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, material culture scholars, and social historians interested in a wide variety of time periods and subfields.

In The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self, Susan Harrow explores the fascinating interrelation of subjectivity, materiality, and representation in the poetry and related texts of four modern French writers: Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Ponge, and Jacques Réda. She demonstrates the richness and the relevance of modern French poetry for today's readers, putting contemporary thought to work on the fractured self emerging in the post-Baudelairian lyric. Harrow addresses the widely perceived marginalization of poetry in the writing/theory debate, demonstrating that the emergence of a self at once shaped by and straining against material, historical, subjective, and cultural impediments reveals fertile relations between theory and poetry. Where purer forms of postmodernist thinking have stressed the dissolution and dispersal of the human subject, new approaches informed by cultural studies, autobiography theory, and gender studies work to recover fictions of experience and retrieve submerged narratives of the self. Probing the activity of textual self-recovery among the debris of history and fantasy, visuality and desire, and culture and corporeality, The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self imparts something of the startling beauty and the raw urgency of poetry writing across the broad modern period.

Generally individuals in history are known for a particular reason - they somehow influenced history. Very little is known about the ordinary person who lived in the past. But historical archaeologists - through their interpretation of the material culture and historic record - can study the past on an individual level. This brings archaeological interpretation from a micro to a macro level - as opposed to the traditional level of society to community to individual interpretation. The cases presented in this volume engage material culture that is owned or used by a single person and is thus associated with an individual at some point in its uselife. The volume takes bodkins, shoes, beads, cloth, religious items, grave goods, as well as subassemblages from well-defined contexts from New England, the Chesapeake, New Orleans, Hawaii, Spanish colonial America, and London in the pursuit of the individual and the textured interpretation this analytical scale provides. This volume promises to present innovative approaches to a host of archaeological materials, drawing widely on the range of archaeological research for the historical period today. Capitalizing on several topics and research threads with great currency, such as the examination of material culture and interest in various and intersecting lines of identity construction, as well as presenting an international and multiregional approach to these topics, this volume will be of interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, material culture scholars, and social historians interested in a wide variety of time periods and subfields.

With Wayne Bennett From the silky wax qualities of the surfaces of some quartz menhirs to the wood-grain textures of others, to the golden honeycombed limestones of Malta, to the icy frozen waves of the Cambrian sandstone of south-east Sweden, this book investigates the sensuous material qualities of stone. Tactile sensations, sonorous qualities, colour, and visual impressions are all shown to play a vital part in our understanding of the power and significance of prehistoric monuments in relation to their landscapes. In The Materiality of Stone, Christopher Tilley presents a radically new way of analyzing the significance of both 'cultural' and 'natural' stone in prehistoric European landscapes. Tilley's groundbreaking approach is to interpret human experience in a multidimensional and sensuous human way, rather than through an abstract analytical gaze. The studies range widely from the menhirs of prehistoric Brittany to Maltese Neolithic temples to Bronze Age rock carvings and cairns in southern Sweden. Tilley leaves no stone unturned as he also considers how the internal spaces and landscape settings are interpreted in relation to artifacts, substances, and related places that were deeply meaningful to the people who inhabited them and remain no less evocative today. In its innovative approach to understanding human experience through the tangible rocks and stone of our past, The Materiality of Stone is both a major theoretical and substantive contribution to the field of material culture studies and the study of European prehistory.

Generally individuals in history are known for a particular reason - they somehow influenced history. Very little is known about the ordinary person who lived in the past. But historical archaeologists - through their interpretation of the material culture and historic record - can study the past on an individual level. This brings archaeological interpretation from a micro to a macro level - as opposed to the traditional level of society to community to individual interpretation. The cases presented in this volume engage material culture that is owned or used by a single person and is thus associated with an individual at some point in its uselife. The volume takes bodkins, shoes, beads, cloth, religious items, grave goods, as well as subassemblages from well-defined contexts from New England, the Chesapeake, New Orleans, Hawaii, Spanish colonial America, and London in the pursuit of the individual and the textured interpretation this analytical scale provides. This volume promises to present innovative approaches to a host of archaeological materials, drawing widely on the range of archaeological research for the historical period today. Capitalizing on several topics and research threads with great currency, such as the examination of material culture and interest in various and intersecting lines of identity construction, as well as presenting an international and multiregional approach to these topics, this volume will be of interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, material culture scholars, and social historians interested in a wide variety of time periods and subfields.

Since the founding of the United States, the rights to citizenship have been carefully crafted and policed by the Europeans who originally settled and founded the country. Immigrants have been extended and denied citizenship in various legal and cultural ways. While the subject of citizenship has often been examined from a sociological, historical, or legal perspective, historical archaeologists have yet to fully explore the material aspects of these social boundaries. The Archaeology of Citizenship uses the material record to explore what it means to be an American. Using a late-nineteenth-century California resort as a case study, Stacey Camp discusses how the parameters of citizenship and national belonging have been defined and redefined since Europeans arrived on the continent. In a unique and powerful contribution to the field of historical archaeology, Camp uses the remnants of material culture to reveal how those in power sought to mold the composition of the United States and how those on the margins of American society carved out their own definitions of citizenship.

This book bridges theoretical gaps that exist between the meta-concepts of memory, place and identity by positioning its lens on the emplaced practices of commemoration and the remembrance of war and conflict. This book examines how diverse publics relate to their wartime histories through engagements with everyday collective memories, in differing places. Specifically addressing questions of place-making, displacement and identity, contributions shed new light on the processes of commemoration of war in everyday urban façades and within generations of families and national communities. Contributions seek to clarify how we connect with memories and places of war and conflict. The spatial and narrative manifestations of attempts to contextualise wartime memories of loss, trauma, conflict, victory and suffering are refracted through the roles played by emotion and identity construction in the shaping of post-war remembrances. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective, with insights from history, memory studies, social psychology, cultural and urban geography, to contextualise memories of war and their ‘use’ by national governments, perpetrators, victims and in family histories.

The Matter of History links the history of people with the history of things through a bold new materialist theory of the past.

'Fashioning the Self: Identity and Style in British Culture' offers an eclectic approach to contemporary fashion studies. Taking a broad definition of British culture, this collection of essays explores the significance of style to issues such as colonialism, race, gender and class, embracing topics as diverse as eighteenth-century portraiture, literary dress culture and Edwardian working-class glamour. Examining the emblematic power of garments themselves and the context in which they are styled, this work interrogates the ways that personal style can itself decontextualize garments to radically reframe their meanings. Using an intentionally eclectic range of subjects from an interdisciplinary perspective, this collection builds on the work of theorists such as Aileen Ribeiro, Vika Martina Plock, Cheryl Buckley and Hilary Fawcett, to examine the social significance of personal style, while also highlighting the diversity of British culture itself.