Writing by Topic: Material Culture
On the Vault
- “Nazi Photos Documenting Heaps of Everyday Objects Looted From Jewish Households” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, October 2, 2015)
- “The Lucky Charms Soldiers Carried Into WWI” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, January 13, 2015)
- “Hopeful Hand-Embroidered Christmas Cards, Sent Home from the Front During WWI” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, December 23, 2014)
- “Nifty Methods for Smuggling Contraband, From a Manual for WWII-Era British Spies” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, December 5, 2014)
- “Super-Fancy Pop-Up Greeting Cards, Sent for Rosh Hashanah in Early 20th-Century New York” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, September 24, 2014)
- “A Brooklyn Woman’s Colorful Quilt, Illustrating Her Experience of the Civil War” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, March 18, 2014)
- “Convicts Transported to Australia Left Loved Ones With These Emotional Tokens of Their Affections” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, February 20, 2014)
- “A Beautiful Driftwood-and-Sealskin Map, Carved by an Inuit Hunter in 1925” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, January 8, 2014)
- “Picking Through George Washington’s Trash” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, September 12, 2013)
- “Pretty Pincushions, Embroidered by British Soldiers in WWI and Sent to Their Sweethearts Back Home” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, September 11, 2013)
- “An Unbelievably Intricate Drunken-Monkey Diorama, Carved by a Prisoner as a Gift to Henry Ford” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, September 9, 2013)
- “The Hottest Celebrity of Early 19th-Century America Was a 67-Year-Old Frenchman” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, August 19, 2013)
- “Foundling Tokens: For Surrendered Children, a Final Tie to Family” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, May 2, 2013)
- “Stitching the Solar System: Science as Needlepoint, 1811” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, March 20, 2013)
- “The World’s First Baby Monitor: Zenith’s 1937 ‘Radio Nurse'” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, February 7, 2013)
- “Early Hackers’ Supersecret Spyware: Toy Whistles” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, February 1, 2013)
Everywhere Else
- “Show & Tell: A 19th-Century Chatelaine” (Mental Floss online, February 19, 2016)
- “Show & Tell: Visconti Tarot Cards” (Mental Floss online, February 5, 2016)
- “Show & Tell: Inuit Snow Goggles” (Mental Floss online, January 29, 2016)
- “Show & Tell: Powder Horn Map” (Mental Floss online, January 15, 2016)
- “Show & Tell: An Antique Love Token from a Broken Heart” (Mental Floss online, January 8, 2016)
- “Show & Tell: 17th-Century Falcon’s Hood” (Mental Floss online, December 18, 2015)
- “Show & Tell: The Blaschka Glass Flowers” (Mental Floss online, December 11, 2015)
- “Show & Tell: The Lamp That Saved Coal Miners’ Lives” (Mental Floss online, December 4, 2015)
- “Show & Tell: Artifacts from the Atari Tomb” (Mental Floss online, November 20, 2015)
- “Ode to Green Slime” (The Atlantic.com, February 6, 2015)
- “Object Lessons: 100 Examples of the Stuff History Was Made On” (Times Higher Education, October 23, 2014)
- “Crappy Taxidermy Internet Meme Is Really Sort of Sad” (Slate‘s Wild Things blog, April 8, 2014)
- “Pasteur for Kids” (Songbirds and Satellites, April 4, 2011)
- “Killing Dollies, in the Name of the State” (Songbirds and Satellites, February 10, 2011)
- “Drowning in Toys” (Songbirds and Satellites, December 17, 2010)
- “In the Dusty Toy-Bin of History at the Strong Museum” (Songbirds and Satellites, November 12, 2010)
- “Archival Gleanings from the Chemical Heritage Foundation” (Songbirds and Satellites, October 14, 2010)
- “Velcro’s Generation of Idiots” (Songbirds and Satellites, October 8, 2010)