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Most historians of the Civil War era have neglected material culture studies, but the field has a great deal to offer to scholars. Numerous relics survive from the time period, and they can be found in museums, historical societies, and state archives; they are also mentioned frequently in the manuscripts. People who lived through the war used objects to convey a host of powerful cultural messages about their experiences.

By the mid-nineteenth century, trading networks between London and Freetown, Sierra Leone, were well-established. White and black businessmen and women were beginning to profit from the shift from the slave trade to “legitimate” commerce. Sierra Leone’s emerging, property-owning middle class lived in comfortable two-story stone houses. These homes were decorated with articles of material comfort and markers, in the imperial cultural complex, of accumulating wealth: mahogany chairs, tables, sofas, and four-post bedsteads, pier glasses, and floor cloths. Sierra Leoneans consumed the products of Empire, dressing as British subjects, building houses with British brick, and buying British luxury goods. But how did different groups of Sierra Leoneans adopt and adapt British material culture? Did trading connections foster a sense of British identity, or were these products used in particularly “West African” ways? How did the growth of the project of “legitimate trade” contribute to a sense of the British imperial project amongst Sierra Leoneans? This chapter will explore the ways that material culture and commodities shaped the lives of settlers in this colony and their interactions with both the metropole and the rest of West Africa.

The rise of religion as a modern category, with Protestantism as its main exponent, has introduced a set of oppositions that privilege spirit above matter, belief above ritual, content above form, mind above body, and spirituality above materiality. This has ever since entailed a devaluation of religious material culture, and materiality at large, as lacking serious empirical, let alone theoretical interest. Today, these modern binaries still linger on in everyday parlance in Western societies, with believers and (atheist) opponents alike embracing the notion that spirit and matter are mutually exclusive. The emerging academic critique of this conceptualization raises major issues for the study of religion, issues that are addressed in the book that is introduced by this chapter: how to approach, study, and speak about religion in new, critical ways, from a position beyond the established and worn-out concepts?

This chapter examines Henry Hunt's signature white hat in the context of the use of the tradition of using colours and material objects to signify oppositional opinion while evading prosecution for sedition. It traces the performativity of mute sedition from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, while focusing on the French Revolutionary period and the widely understood nature of Hunt's headgear for his followers and admirers.

This introductory chapter first establishes the disciplinary spectrum within which Hot Metal operates. It outlines how recent studies of design and material culture have focused less on production and labour, and more on consumption, interpretation and professional design, and examines the place of material culture in labour history. The Introduction opens the path to demonstrating a more effective way to interweave studies of working life, labour and design, while retaining the voices of the workers (through oral history), without aestheticising or sentimentalising labour experience. The chapter also introduces Sydney’s Government Printing Office as a rich and revealing case study that holds valuable lessons for those examining the cultural and social impacts of deindustrialisation in late capitalist economies. Finally, the Introduction sets the economic and political scene in Sydney between the 1960s and the 1980s: important background for understanding the changes that the print-workers experienced.

Opening with an examination of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century modernity, the introduction argues that, faced with profound structural shifts, commentators of the period frequently deployed the language of magic and the Arabian Nights in order to communicate and make sense of their new, urban, industrial environments. Outlining the history of the arrival of the Arabian Nights in Europe and its remarkable propensity to proliferate, it establishes the temporal and structural openness of this story collection, which invites diverse application in multiple locations. In the case of nineteenth-century Britain, it argues, the tales were used to reflect and refract new materials and ideas, offering different ways for British readers to interpret and to frame their experiences. While engaging with questions of imperialism and Orientalism, the introduction draws recent scholarship on thing theory into the history of reading practices, in order to register the potentially transformative powers of reading in the context of the emotional, psychological and material relationships forged with the Arabian Nights in nineteenth-century Britain. Alongside the more familiar narrative of its prevalence as material with which to manage the Orient, it points to moments of exchange, immersion and receptivity to the realm of the other, and to narratives shared and adapted across cultures.

Chapter 5 provides analysis of two archaeological Dismal Swamp sites. In the case of the nameless site, archaeology shows that an interior community persisted from ca. 1600 to the Civil War. It was organized around rank and kin principals, community-driven subsistence labor systems, and a steadfast avoidance of the world outside the swamp, including its material culture (commodities). They relied on ancient stone tools and ceramics left at the site by Indigenous Americans; reuse of ancient objects was a hallmark of daily living among interior groups. After 1800, an increase in outside world commodities and an apparent shrinking of the size of the community at the nameless site suggests that important changes occurred. Very differently, during the period 1800–1860 enslaved laborers living at the Cross Canal site relied heavily upon commodities from the world outside the swamp and developed informal trade systems within the swamp where such materials circulated. Evidence shows that the Cross Canal settlement may have developed trade relations with the nameless site settlement which helps explain the increase in outside world materials at the latter. Throughout the discussion, alienation is discussed and is a central part of analysis.

The chapter analyzes the cultural value of smuggled goods in Spanish America and Europe as a means to understand the acculturation to illicit activity that early modern Venezuelans experienced. For their cacao, Venezuelans received, not the exotic items typically associated with illicit trade, but rather mundane wares and foodstuffs such as flour, coarse cloth, liquor, and firearms. Inventories of contraband confiscated from homes and businesses suggest both the tremendous inability of the Spanish Empire to supply its more marginal colonies with simple trade and the ways that Venezuelans creatively used smuggling to deal with this dearth of subsistence goods. Furthermore, court cases of smuggling highlight the importance of women as retail distributors of contraband on land. All of these circumstances revealed the colonists’ viewpoint on illegality: the cultural superiority manifested in consuming even simple European items merited the complications of illicit trade including bloodshed, commercial policing, and property confiscation. Black-market commerce at even the pettiest levels initiated coastal residents into a criminal world where they developed justifications and subterfuges for their everyday actions. In essence, residents had been socialized into smuggling.

Focusing on the national museums of Ghana and Mali, this chapter examines the ways in which cultural heritage was dealt with in these institutions, alongside the modernisation projects of these emerging nation states. The National Museum of Ghana occupied a complex conceptual space in the years preceding and following independence. By displaying material culture from across the nation, the museum participated in Ghana’s ongoing nation building. However, it also had a duty to avoid presenting the diversity of cultures in a divisive way to accord with Nkrumahist efforts to promote national unity as well as Pan-Africanism. In contrast, The National Museum of Mali suffered during the decolonisation era and was not recognised as a public space for displaying cultural heritage. For young Malians, the processes of transmitting cultural values from the state to the citizens were more successfully achieved by the hugely popular annual events (les semaines de la jeunesse) launched by the ‘pioneers’ in 1960 than by their own museums.

The introduction establishes the significance of King Philip’s War, called the “great watershed” for the powerful ways in which it reshaped Native and colonial communities, lives, and memories in the Northeast. It provides a general overview of historiographical debates on the topic, including the importance of localizing scholarly studies of North America and the Atlantic World; incorporating material culture and ethnography sources as well as documentary/archival evidence; and pursuing “decolonizing methodologies” in which researchers create more reciprocal relationships with tribal descendant communities. The introduction also stresses the necessity of locally grounded “fieldwork,” and highlights some considerations in choosing to focus on historical violence. It emphasizes that the violences of the seventeenth century continue to reverberate among descendant communities—Native as well as Euro-American—and that these legacies merit serious attention.

This chapter brings together bodies, emotions, and objects through the most desirable idealised man of all: the martial man. Fictional and real military men were imagined through emotionalised bodies, with material culture often acting as the point of entry for the cultural work they performed in producing and disseminating manliness. Drawing on the concept of emotional objects, three types of material culture are examined, which inspired feelings that reinforced ideas about idealised manliness. The first group are the artefacts of war and the military, including uniforms, weaponry, battle-field-objects, medals, ships, and regimental colours. The second are the objects encountered at the domestic level including toys, ceramics, and textiles, which depicted martial manliness or had intimate connections with soldiers and sailors. They appealed to all age groups, genders, and social classes, and had a domestic function or ornamental appeal. The third type considered consists of the material culture that celebrity military heroes generated, from consumable products that deployed their names and images, to the monuments that memorialised them, to the very stuff of their bodies. This irresistible nexus of emotionalised bodies and objects prompted affective responses, which disseminated, reinforced, and maintained civilian masculinities. (192 words)