material history
This is very frustrating.I feel like I'm going a bit crazy.
Has anyone else heard of a subject called "material history" -- or something similar?
When I was applying to college, I was confident I'd major in either English or History. English was the only subject in which I'd gotten A's without effort. My dad was a professor of literature and a scholar of Shakespeare and Shaw.
History didn't interest me much in grade school, but one summer, when the old man and I spent a month camping on the side of a mountain, some question I asked inspired an afternoon-long narrative history of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, the Spanish Armada, the Black Irish, and the Jesuits. I was hooked, and I decided to fill up my high-school schedule with history courses, including 20th-century Russia and AP European History.
(When I got to college, I discovered philosophy and computer science and never took a single literature or history course while I was there.)
My AP course was my first experience outside English class of having multiple books to read, rather than having a standard textbook. My two favorite of these books were an intellectual history and a material history. The former was about great thinkers, who wrote what when, which ideas took off in which territories, etc. It was good prep for college philosophy. The other book was about when people stopped using a common cup at the dinner table, when and where the fork was introduced as a complement to the knife, when Europeans started using different spices with their meals, what the development of the western sweet tooth had to do with the slave trade and the politics of the New World, etc. I haven't seen anything like it since.
Or rather, I've seen things that look like bits and pieces of it. There was a bestseller a few years back called Salt: A World History, and Burt Wolf has done some good half-hour shows on PBS like "The Story of Corn." (My wife reminds me that James Burke's Connections is also a good fit.)But not only can I not find any books on material history at Amazon.com -- I can't even find evidence of such a subject as "material history" in Google or Wikipedia.
Can anyone help me out here? Am I misremembering the name? Did I make the whole thing up? It's been over 20 years since those high school history classes; is this my punishment for abandoning the subject?
4 Comments:
No, you're not making it up. I too am familiar with the term "material history" and have been interested in the subject. I did a fair bit of research last summer on the use of particular culinary utensils in 17th-century France, and that definitely qualifies as "material history." (There are LOADS of French titles on the history of food, culinary arts, table etiquette, etc.) I also knew a PhD student back at UVa who was specializing in some sort of history of technology (through the English department-- I think he was an expert on the history of the typewriter or something like that). In fact, I *thought* that it was a bit of a hot area in history departments lately, but that could just have been among my colleagues at Penn State Altoona.
Perhaps you should try broadening your search to "cultural studies" or "interdisciplinary studies"--maddeningly vague terms that seem to have no definitive boundaries, but you never know, you may find the kinds of things you want to read there.
Oh, I'm also remembering a series (in French) called "Histoire de la vie privée" [A History of Private Life] that was quite interesting, and covered the sorts of things that fall under material history. Perhaps there's some sort of Anglophone equivalent.
The Canada Science and Technology Museum publishes a twice-yearly journal called Materials History Review:
http://www.sciencetech.technomuses.ca/ENGLISH/about/hreview.cfm
From the description:
The Museum publishes a journal twice a year. It documents cultural artifacts, describing their historical context and examining their role within society. As the foremost journal of material culture study in Canada, Material History Review (MHR) serves as a link between social historians, historians of technology, art and architecture, anthropologists and geographers throughout Canada and abroad. Refereed articles reflect the latest scholarship and research trends in North America and abroad.
Sounds fascinating! You can view some of the article titles on the same site. It appears as though the journal has been published since 1976.
Good stuff.
I did more lunchtime googling... it appears as though what you remember as "material history" is now called "material culture" or "cultural history".
Googling "material culture" provides plenty of links on the topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_materials_science
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