Elusive Archives

The essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed or subjective? Such things resist the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections. What holds these disparate things together here are the questions authors ask of them. Each essay creates by means of its method a provisional collection of things, an elusive archive.  Scattered matter then becomes fixed within each author’s analytical framework rather than within the walls of an archive’s reading room or in cases along a museum corridor.
This book follows the ways in which objects may be identified, gathered, arranged, conceptualized and even displayed rather than by “discovering” artifacts in an archive and then asking how they came to be there. The authors approach material culture outside the traditional bounds of learning about the past. Their essays are varied not only in subject matter but also in narrative format and conceptual reach, making the volume accessible and easy to navigate for a quick reference or, if read straight through, build toward a new way to think about material culture.

Elusive Archives asks how historians, librarians, and museum professionals can bring together scattered, lost, or otherwise forgotten objects into a provisional collection, an elusive archive.  Addressing a wide range of objects, the authors’ diverse approaches, varying formats, and wide scope of inquiries describe a new conceptual territory at the intersection of archival studies and material culture studies.

MARTIN BRÜCKNER is the director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture and a professor in the English department at the University of Delaware in Newark. His books include The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 and The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity.
SANDY ISENSTADT is a professor and chair of the art history department at the University of Delaware in Newark. His most recent book, Electric Light: An Architectural History, is the first sustained examination of the architectural spaces generated by the introduction of electric lighting. 

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: “The Elusive Archive in Material Culture Studies” by Martin Brückner and Sandy Isenstadt

I. Archives in Practice

1. “On the Material Culture of Multispecies Relating”

Julian Yates

2. “Archive Vision”

Wendy Bellion

3. “Fugitive Archives: Privilege and Practice”

Julie L. McGee

4. “Touch and the Making of Religious Material Culture. Visiting the Lourdes Shrine”

Torsten Cress

5. “A historian walks into a bar… Or, a story about alternative ways of finding and

using archives when the normal avenues don’t cut it”

Cindy Ott

6. “Historical Form(s)”

Laura Helton

II. Archives in Objects

7. “Both Lost and Found: A Portrait of the Enslaved Homer Ryan”

Jennifer Van Horn

8. “The Chaise Sandows: Object as (Obscured) Archive”

Kiersten Thamm

9. “Decoupage: Cutting Ephemera and Assembling Sentiment”

Alexandra Ward

10. “’Inscribe, Lord, Your Will in My Stone Heart’: Finding Religious History in

German-American Illuminated Manuscripts”

Alexander Lawrence Ames

11. “The Mobile Architectural Archive”

Halina Adams

12. “The Case of the Mysterious Chest-on-Frame”

Rosalie Hooper

III. Archives in Places

13. “Refuse, Refuge, Relic”

Sarah Wasserman

14. “Searching for the Lost Mines of Albert Bierstadt”

Spencer Wigmore

15. “Landscapes of Refuge: Recovering the Materiality of Underground Railroad

Landscapes in Delaware”

Catherine Morrissey

16. “Desolation in Crowded Spaces: Reconstructing the Material Culture of Internment”

Michelle Everidge Anderson

17. “Seeking Hózhó: The Post-Apocalyptic Landscapes of Will Wilson’s AIR Weave”

Kaila T. Schedeen

18. “Buried Archives”

Lu Ann De Cunzo

IV. Archives in Circulation

19. “Ikuo Yokoyama’s Motorcycle: Entropic Decay and the Anatomy of a Disaster”

Natalie Elizabeth Wright

20. “Fraktur: Material Religion and Print Culture in the Early German-Language Atlantic

World”

Oliver Scheiding

21. “John Hancock’s Fugitive Tar”

J. Ritchie Garrison

22. “Stability Lost: Monetary Conditions of Refugees from World War II and the Syrian

Civil War”

Jesse Kraft

23. “Inscribing Sanctuary: Early American Buildings and Apotropaic Markings, 1700-

1850”

Michael Emmons

24. “Bottling Death and Brewing Resistance in Temperance Literature and Reform”

Jessica Conrad

Afterword: “Elusive Archives and the Poetical Promise of Objects”

Bernard L. Herman

Notes on Contributors

Index