Tag archive for material culture - page 3

Call for Papers: From Decay to Deterioration: Questioning the Aesthetics of Abandonment

I’m working on putting together a panel for the 2011 American Studies Association conference. The Call for Papers is below. The decay of the built environment has become a subject more of aesthetic fascination than of fear for many twenty-first-century Americans. Real communities such as…

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Drowning in Toys

Sotheby’s, in New York, auctioned off Malcolm Forbes’ toy collection today. I heard about it through a Margot Adler story on NPR, which filled me in on the history of this giant conglomeration of nineteenth and early twentieth-c playthings. Forbes was the kind of man…

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Archival Gleanings from the Chemical Heritage Foundation

For the past two weeks, I’ve been at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, benefitting from their travel grant program, which is supporting my research in their large collection of chemistry sets and other science sets. Before I came here, I thought I would be able to…

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