Material Histories Of Time

The historiography of timekeeping is traditionally characterized by a dichotomy between research that investigates the evolution of technical devices on the one hand, and research that is concerned with the examination of the cultures and uses of time on the other hand. Material Histories of Time opens a dialogue between these two approaches by taking monumental clocks, table clocks, portable watches, carriage clocks, and other forms of timekeeping as the starting point of a joint reflection of specialists of the history of horology together with scholars studying the social and cultural history of time. The contributions range from the apparition of the first timekeeping mechanical systems in the Middle Ages to the first evidence of industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This Element deals with stories told about substances and ways to analyse them through an Environmental Humanitie's perspective. It then takes up rubber as an example and its many stories. It is shown that the common notions of rubber history, which assume that rubber only became a useful material through a miraculous operation called vulcanization, that is attributed to the US-American Charles Goodyear, are false. In contrast, it is shown that rubber and many important rubber products are inventions of Indigenous peoples of South America, made durable by a process that can be called organic vulcanization. It is with that invention, that the story of rubber starts. Without it, rubber would not exist, neither in the Americas nor elsewhere. Finally, it is shown that Indigenous rubber products also offer some ecological advantages over industrially manufactured ones.

This volume comprises a selection of papers and reviews concerning material culture. / Ce volume comporte un choix d’articles et de comptes rendus relatifs à la culture matérielle.

The first cultural history of early modern cryptography, this collection brings together scholars in history, literature, music, the arts, mathematics, and computer science who study ciphering and deciphering from new materialist, media studies, cognitive studies, disability studies, and other theoretical perspectives. Essays analyze the material forms of ciphering as windows into the cultures of orality, manuscript, print, and publishing, revealing that early modern ciphering, and the complex history that preceded it in the medieval period, not only influenced political and military history but also played a central role in the emergence of the capitalist media state in the West, in religious reformation, and in the scientific revolution. Ciphered communication, whether in etched stone and bone, in musical notae, runic symbols, polyalphabetic substitution, algebraic equations, graphic typographies, or literary metaphors, took place in contested social spaces and offered a means of expression during times of political, economic, and personal upheaval. Ciphering shaped the early history of linguistics as a discipline, and it bridged theological and scientific rhetoric before and during the Reformation. Ciphering was an occult art, a mathematic language, and an aesthetic that influenced music, sculpture, painting, drama, poetry, and the early novel. This collection addresses gaps in cryptographic history, but more significantly, through cultural analyses of the rhetorical situations of ciphering and actual solved and unsolved medieval and early modern ciphers, it traces the influences of cryptographic writing and reading on literacy broadly defined as well as the cultures that generate, resist, and require that literacy. This volume offers a significant contribution to the history of the book, highlighting the broader cultural significance of textual materialities.

Most historians rely principally on written sources. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians: the material things that people have chosen, made, and used. This book examines how material culture can enhance historians' understanding of the past, both worldwide and across time. The successful use of material culture in history depends on treating material things of many kinds not as illustrations, but as primary evidence. Each kind of material thing-and there are many-requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Creative historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying more traditional text-based documents even as they borrow methods from these fields. They can think through familiar historical problems in new ways. They can also deploy material culture to discover the pasts of constituencies who have left few or no traces in written records. The authors of this volume contribute case studies arranged thematically in six sections that respectively address the relationship of history and material culture to cognition, technology, the symbolic, social distinction, and memory. They range across time and space, from Paleolithic to Punk.

History from Things explores the many ways objects—defined broadly to range from Chippendale tables and Italian Renaissance pottery to seventeenth-century parks and a New England cemetery—can reconstruct and help reinterpret the past. Eighteen essays describe how to “read” artifacts, how to “listen to” landscapes and locations, and how to apply methods and theories to historical inquiry that have previously belonged solely to archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and conservation scientists. Spanning vast time periods, geographical locations, and academic disciplines, History from Things leaps the boundaries between fields that use material evidence to understand the past. The book expands and redirects the study of material culture—an emerging field now building a common base of theory and a shared intellectual agenda.