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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.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
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
About the author
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.
Summary
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.
