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Asking how Americans’ fraught relationship with class has played out in public history

In 1966, a Smithsonian curator proposed recreating a “slum” dwelling inside the Museum of History and Technology, complete with rats in the walls, synthesized smells, and heat in summer and cold in winter. The public was not pleased. One editorialist called it “preserving a very insignificant aspect of civilization.” A Life magazine reporter worried that schoolchildren on field trips might find the exhibit’s horrors “pretty tame compared to their own homes.” The proposal was shelved. But the debate it ignited over whether poverty could or should be presented in museums cast a long shadow in US public history. 

In Curating Poverty, Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan examines how public historians have curated, preserved, and interpreted the experiences of people living in poverty—and how different publics have responded to these efforts. Poverty and economic inequality have shaped the lives of millions of Americans since the colonial period. For most of the nation’s history, welfare institutions such as almshouses and poor farms could be found in nearly every county in the United States. Yet explicit interpretation of poverty, welfare, and inequality remains an outlier in public history.

Documenting attempts to incorporate histories of poverty and class into exhibitions from the 1930s to the present, O’Brassill-Kulfan interrogates institutions of varying sizes and missions, paying particular attention to museums within the Smithsonian network. She traces how communities and public historians have remembered, neglected, erased, and sometimes reclaimed the surviving landscapes of poverty relief—from preserved almshouses and poor farm cemeteries to tenement museums and public housing sites. By placing poverty at the center of public history, Curating Poverty reveals how Americans have constructed, contested, and obscured histories of class and inequality and what it might look like to finally tell those stories honestly.

Located less than a mile from Juárez, the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso is a non-collecting institution that serves the Paso del Norte region. In Curating at the Edge, Kate Bonansinga brings to life her experiences as the Rubin’s founding director, giving voice to a curatorial approach that reaches far beyond the limited scope of “border art” or Chicano art. Instead, Bonansinga captures the creative climate of 2004–2011, when contemporary art addressed broad notions of destruction and transformation, irony and subversion, gender and identity, and the impact of location on politics.

The Rubin’s location in the Chihuahuan desert on the U.S./Mexican border is meaningful and intriguing to many artists, and, consequently, Curating at the Edge describes the multiple artistic perspectives conveyed in the place-based exhibitions Bonansinga oversaw. Exciting mid-career artists featured in this collection of case studies include Margarita Cabrera, Liz Cohen, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and many others. Recalling her experiences in vivid, first-person scenes, Bonansinga reveals the processes a contemporary art curator undertakes and the challenges she faces by describing a few of the more than sixty exhibitions that she organized during her tenure at the Rubin. She also explores the artists’ working methods and the relationship between their work and their personal and professional histories (some are Mexican citizens, some are U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, and some have ancestral ties to Europe). Timely and illuminating, Curating at the Edge sheds light on the work of the interlocutors who connect artists and their audiences.

“As is well known, Pete is an outstanding storyteller, and this book is no exception."
—Claire Strom, Journal of Southern History

In addition to chronicling significant exhibit work at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Curating the American Past, captures the excitement inherent in researching and writing history and Pete Daniel’s efforts to prevent diluted celebratory stories from replacing the red meat of the American past.

In Curating the American Past, Pete Daniel reveals how curators collect objects, plan exhibits, and bring alive the country’s complex and exciting history. In vivid detail, Daniel recounts the exhilaration of innovative research, the joys of collaboration, and the rewards of mentoring new generations of historians. In a career distinguished by prize-winning publications and pathbreaking exhibitions, Daniel also confronted the challenges of serving as a public historian tasked with protecting a definitive American museum from the erosion of scholarly standards. Curating the American Past offers a wealth of museum wisdom, illuminating the crucial role that dedicated historians and curators serve within our most important repositories of cultural memory.

Tracing the birth of American museums and the curators who shaped a nation’s cultural identity.

As they formed their pioneer museums, these men were guided not so much by European examples, but rather by the imperatives of the American democratic culture, including the Enlightenment, the simultaneous decline of the respectability and rise of the middle classes, the Age of Egalitarianism, and the advent of professionalism in the sciences. Thus the pre-1870 American museum was neither the frivolous sideshow some critics have imagined, nor the enclave for elitists that others have charged. Instead, the proprietors displayed serious motives and egalitarian aspirations.

The conflicting demands for popular education on the one hand and professionalism on the other were a continuing source of tension in American museums after about 1835, but by 1870 the two claims had synthesized into a rough parity. This synthesis, the "American Compromise," has remained the basic model of museums in America down to the present. Thus, by 1870, the form of the modern American museum as an institution which simultaneously provides popular education and promotes scholarly research was completely developed.

New directions and fresh insight for scholars and students

The single greatest catalyst and contributor to our developing understanding of priestly literature has been Jacob Milgrom (1923-2010), whose seminal articles, provocative hypotheses, and comprehensively probing books vastly expanded and significantly altered scholarship regarding priestly and related literature. Nineteen articles build on Milgrom's work and look to future directions of research. Essays cover a range of topics including the interpretation, composition and literary structure of priestly and holiness texts as well as their relationships to deuteronomic and extra-biblical texts. The book includes a bibliography of Milgrom's work published between 1994 and 2014.

Features:

This volume provides the most comprehensive overview of archaeological research into the late Pleistocene and early Holocene occupation of the North American Far West in over a decade. It focuses on the relationship between stemmed and fluted point technologies in the region, which has recently risen to the forefront of debate about the initial settlement of the Americas. Established and early career researchers apply a wide range of analytical approaches to explore chronological, geographical, and technological aspects of these tools and what they reveal about the people who made them. While such interrelationships have intrigued archaeologists for nearly a century, until now they have not been systematically examined together in a single curated volume.

Contributions are organized into three main sections: stemmed point technologies, fluted point technologies, and broader interactions. Topics range from regional overviews of chronologies and technologies to site-level findings containing extensive new data. The culmination of many years of work by dozens of researchers, this volume lays new groundwork for understanding technological innovation, diversity, and exchange among early Indigenous peoples in North America.

How do early modern media underlie today’s digital creativity? 

In Cut/Copy/Paste, Whitney Trettien journeys to the fringes of the London print trade to uncover makerspaces and collaboratories where paper media were cut up and reassembled into radical, bespoke publications. Bringing these long-forgotten objects back to life through hand-curated digital resources, Trettien shows how early experimental book hacks speak to the contemporary conditions of digital scholarship and publishing. As a mixed-media artifact itself, Cut/Copy/Paste enacts for readers what Trettien argues: that digital forms have the potential to decenter patriarchal histories of print.

From the religious household of Little Gidding—whose biblical concordances and manuscripts exemplify protofeminist media innovation—to the queer poetic assemblages of Edward Benlowes and the fragment albums of former shoemaker John Bagford, Cut/Copy/Paste demonstrates history’s relevance to our understanding of current media. Tracing the lives and afterlives of amateur “bookwork,” Trettien creates a method for identifying and comprehending hybrid objects that resist familiar bibliographic and literary categories. In the process, she bears witness to the deep history of radical publishing with fragments and found materials.

With many of Cut/Copy/Paste’s digital resources left thrillingly open for additions and revisions, this book reimagines our ideas of publication while fostering a spirit of generosity and inclusivity. An open invitation to cut, copy, and paste different histories, it is an inspiration for students of publishing or the digital humanities, as well as anyone interested in the past, present, and future of creativity.

2024 George Perkins Marsh Prize Runner-up
 

What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did these communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest provides a new perspective on the process of industrialization in America through the study of rural workers in a cutover landscape. 

Back when resources started running scarce, the environment of the forest and bodies of workers became the natural resources from which mills and landowners extracted. Bodies and cutover landscapes were mobilized in new ways to increase the scale and efficiency of production—a brutal process for workers, human and animal alike. In the Northern Forest, an industrial working class formed in relation to the unique ways that workers' bodies were used to produce value and in relation to the seasonal cycles of the forest environment.

Cutover Capitalism is an innovative historical study that combines methodological approaches from labor history, environmental history, and the new history of capitalism. The book tells a character-driven yet theoretically sophisticated story about what it was like to live through this process of industrialization. 

He was the winner of 511 major league baseball games, nearly a hundred more than any other pitcher. He threw three no-hitters, including the first perfect game in the new American League. He was among the original twelve players inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame, and his name is now attached to the game's most prestigious pitching award. Yet for all his accomplishments, Cy Young remains to most baseball fans a legendary but little known figure. 

In this book, Reed Browning re-creates the life of Denton True “Cyclone” Young and places his story in the context of a rapidly changing turn-of-the-century America. Born in rural Ohio, the son of a Civil War veteran, Young learned his trade at a time when only underhand pitching was permitted. When he began his professional career in 1890, pitchers wore no gloves and stood five feet closer to the batter than they do today. By the time he retired in 1911, the game of baseball had evolved into its modern form and claimed unquestioned status as America's “national pastime.” 

As Browning shows, Young's extraordinary mastery of his craft owed much to his ability to adapt to the changing nature of the game. Endowed with an exceptional fastball, he gradually developed a wide array of deliveries and pitches—all of which he could throw with astonishing control. Yet his success can also be attributed, at least in part, to the rustic values of loyalty, hard work, and fair play that he embraced and embodied, and for which he became renowned among baseball fans of his day.

Musicologist Michelle Fillion curates a collection of Mumma's writings, presenting revised versions of his classic pieces as well as many unpublished works from every stage of his storied career. Here, through words and astonishing photos, is Mumma's chronicle of seminal events in the musical world of the twentieth century: his cofounding the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music; his role in organizing the historic ONCE Festivals of Contemporary Music; performances with the Sonic Arts Union; and working alongside John Cage and David Tudor as a composer-musician with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In addition, Mumma describes his collaborations with composers, performers, dancers, and visual artists ranging from Robert Ashley and Pauline Oliveros to Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg.

Candid and insightful, Cybersonic Arts is the eye-opening account of a broad artistic community by an active participant and observer.

In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life's activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understanding of the invisible world of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhered to time. Today, only a few of these divinatory codices survive. Visually complex, esoteric, and strikingly beautiful, painted books such as the famous Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus still serve as portals into the ancient Mexican calendrical systems and the cycles of time and meaning they encode.

In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Hill Boone analyzes the entire extant corpus of Mexican divinatory codices and offers a masterful explanation of the genre as a whole. She introduces the sacred, divinatory calendar and the calendar priests and diviners who owned and used the books. Boone then explains the graphic vocabulary of the calendar and its prophetic forces and describes the organizing principles that structure the codices. She shows how they form almanacs that either offer general purpose guidance or focus topically on specific aspects of life, such as birth, marriage, agriculture and rain, travel, and the forces of the planet Venus. Boone also tackles two major areas of controversy—the great narrative passage in the Codex Borgia, which she freshly interprets as a cosmic narrative of creation, and the disputed origins of the codices, which, she argues, grew out of a single religious and divinatory system.