This year’s Public History Conference sponsored by NC State’s History department Saturday featured Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor from Harvard University, and Sarah Anne Carter, a renowned historical author and the director of research at the Chipstone Foundation.
The two scholars presented their collaborative project “Tangible Things,” a book about material culture studies and how that has affected contemporary historical scholarship.
Carter said it is important to observe material culture because studying it allows people to observe historical objects and ask questions about how history and human perception shaped them.
“Early museums were small rooms filled with curiosities and were designed to reflect the education of the curator,” Carter said.
These museums were a collection of objects that portrayed the culture of the area and its people. Eventually the cabinets began to be classified into categories, which prompted the researchers to ask whether or not humans perceive objects differently when they are separated.
“These categories are not fixed or permanent but are a product of newly emerging practices of the 19th and 20th centuries,” Ulrich said.
The scholars found when things are categorized, people’s perception of them becomes limited. Carter used the example of a decorative plate.
“This plate was placed in an anthropological museum, but why is not a piece of art signed by an artist?” Carter said.
One of the goals of the “Tangible Things” project was to create new connections between objects.
“When these objects cross boundaries, we are able to observe new meaning,” Carter said.
The researchers used a comparison between the women’s athletic uniforms from Radcliffe College in the 1890s and the 1920s. After 30 years, there exists a stark contrast between the conservative style of the 1890s and the liberal “flapper” style clothing of the 1920s.
These differences have forced researchers to ask questions about history and what brought about these changes, Carter said. For example, the differences in clothing symbolize increased education equality for women.
“I enjoyed the event, and I think it’s important because objects demand an interdisciplinary perspective in order to understand them and the connections they create,” said Josh Gunn, a sophomore studying political science.
Many of the objects studied by Carter and Ulrich are random objects that were donated to Harvard’s History department. Ulrich quoted Henry David Thoreau to describe why the items were available to them though the university.
“Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?” said Henry David Thoreau.
This quote, presented by Ulrich, is an apt question of the research objects available at Harvard, as there is an assortment of objects available that appear to have no connection other than the fact that they are at Harvard.
This connection is important, the researchers say, because it means each one of these items was donated because it was important to the original owners who believed it held some sort of historical significance.
If these items hold some sort of historical significance then they must constitute some form of our world view, Carter and Ulrich said, similar to the way people created early museums.
This Public History Conference took place in the first year of the history department’s new doctoral program in public history.
