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American Material Culture: Nineteenth-Century New York
Daily Schedule: Details

Participants will have ample time for individual and collaborative work.  Conference time will be used for weekly one half hour meetings with either of the two faculty members for the week (the Director or Guest Instructor).  Research time can be used for BGC or other NYC library work, museum collections work, or use of the Digital Media Lab.

The BGC will host an opening and closing banquet along with weekly lunches with the guest instructor for the week.

WEEK ONE

Guest Instructor: Catherine Whalen; Guest Faculty Diana Wall, Kenneth Ames and Debra Schmidt-Bach
Topic: Introduction to American Material Culture Studies

Monday, July 4
Arrival in New York

Tuesday, July 5
Morning: Welcome and Introductions (to be continued over lunch at BGC)
Seminar with Catherine Whalen and David Jaffee on the historiography of American material culture studies, the approaches of art history, decorative arts, and consumption studies.
Readings: Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison, "Shaping the Field: The Multidisciplinary Perspectives of Material Culture," American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field. eds. Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison. Winterthur: Winterthur Museum, 1997, 1-20; Charles Montgomery, “Some Remarks on the Science and Principles of Connoisseurship,” in The Walpole Society Notebook 1961. Walpole Society, 1962,  56-69; Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17 (Spring 1982): 1-19. 

Lunch: BGC

Afternoon: Seminar continued. Readings: Martin, “Makers, Buyers, and Users: Consumerism as a Material Culture Framework,” Winterthur Portfolio 28, Nos. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1993): 141-157.
Library Orientation to resources at the Bard Graduate Center and other local libraries (Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New-York Historical Society).  BGC Library Staff.

Evening: Opening Banquet

Wednesday, July 6
Morning: Workshop on Silver at the New-York Historical Society (Kenneth Ames and Debra-Schmidt Bach)
Discussion to be followed by Hands-on Workshop (conducted in two groups)
Group A:  Silver Workshop and then tour of Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, open storage collection.
Group B: Luce Tour and then Silver Workshop
Readings: Barbara McLean Ward and Gerald W.R. Ward, eds. “Six Themes of American Silver,” Silver in American Life, Boston: D.R. Godine, 1979, 3-47; Deborah D. Water, ed. Elegant Plate: Three Centuries of Precious Metals in New York City. New York: Museum of the City of New York, 2000, 19^th century selections.

Afternoon: Conferences and Research (Jaffee and Whalen)

Evening: Welcome Banquet

Thursday, July 7
Morning: Seminar with Catherine Whalen and Diana Wall on historical archaeology, history, anthropology and sociology. Readings: James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1996; Bernard L. Herman, “Introduction: Historical Archaeology and the Search for Context,” in Historical Archaeology and the Study of American Culture, eds. Lu Ann De Cunzo and Bernard L. Herman. Winterthur: Winterthur Museum, 1996, 19-31.

Afternoon: Walking Tour with Diana Wall of Lower Manhattan, including African Burial Ground, Five Points, and the National Museum of the American Indian at the U.S. Customs House. Reading: Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall,  “The Archaeology of New York City” and “’We Were Here,” The African Presence in Colonial New York,” Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003, 3-14, 277-94; Graham Hodges. Root and Branch: African Americans in New York. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. 1999, 162-86.

Friday, July 8
Morning: Orientation to the Digital Media Lab with Kimon Keramidas. Survey of online material culture resources.

Afternoon: Conferences and Research

Saturday, July 9
Optional Trip to Governor’s Island and New York Harbor

WEEK TWO

Guest Instructor: Bernard Herman; Guest Faculty, John Kuo Wei Tchen
Topic:  Early National New York, 1800-1840.

Monday, July 11
Morning: Seminar with David Jaffee on the artisans’ workshop and the changing social geography of post-Revolutionary New York. Elizabeth Blackmar, “Rewalking the ‘Walking City’: Housing and Property Relations in New York City, 1780‐1840,” in Robert St. George, ed., Material Life in America. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987, 371‐384; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860.  Urbana: University of Illinois, 1986, 3-62, 105-129; Dell Upton, "Another City: The Urban Cultural Landscape on the Early Republic," in Catherine E. Hutchins, ed., Everyday Life in the Early Republic. Winterthur: Winterthur Museum, 1994), 61-117.

Lunch with Bernard Herman

Afternoon: Visit to the Merchant’s House Museum. Buildings as material artifacts and changing residential patterns in New York. Readings: Cantwell and Wall, Unearthing Gotham, 242-56; Bernard L. Herman, Townhouse: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005, 1-32, 118-54.

Tuesday, July 12
Morning: Visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing to look at early national neoclassical collections.  Special exhibition scheduled on furniture maker Duncan Phyfe, America’s Legendary Cabinetmaker. Reading Peter Kenny, Honore Lannuier, Cabinet Maker from Paris: The Life and Work of a French Ebeniste in Federal New York. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998, 31-78.

Afternoon: Conferences and Research (Jaffee and guest instructor Bernard Herman)

Wednesday, July 13
Morning: Seminar on Early Nineteenth Century Textiles at the American Museum of Folk Art with Bernard Herman on quilts from the 1800-1860 period, with a focus on album and friendship quilts. Readings: Janet Berlo, et. al., Wild by Design: Two Hundred Years of Innovation and Artistry in American Quilts. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003, sel.; Herman, “Architectural Definitions,” Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt, eds. Paul Arnett, Eugene Metcalf, and Joanne Cubbs, 207-219. Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2006.

Afternoon: Workshop with Herman and Stacy Hollander, Senior Curator, at the American Folk Art Museum; tour of exhibit Women Only: Folk Art by Female Hands, to examine early- nineteenth-century American samplers and pictorial needleworks.

Thursday, July 14
Morning: Seminar with John Kuo Wei Tchen on the recovery of the history of the Asian-American community in nineteenth-century New York.  Readings: Tchen, “Below the Grid: Reclaiming the Abjected, Rejected, and Subjected – Manhattan’s Port Cultural Commons” in Blackwell Companion to American Urban History, David Quigley, editor. New York: Blackwell, forthcoming.

Afternoon: Walking tour of Chatham Square and a visit to the Museum of the Chinese in America. Readings, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism & the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 41-96.

Friday, July 15
Morning: Digital workshop on digital tools for exhibitions in teaching and research with Kimon Keramidas

Afternoon: Conferences and Research

WEEK THREE

Guest Instructor: Katherine Grier; Guest Faculty Amelia Peck
Topic: New York, 1840-1870

Monday, July 18
Morning: Seminar with David Jaffee on the rise of the furniture factory and the new domestic interior; emerging modes of cultural entrepreneurship such as museums, restaurants, and expositions. Phineas Taylor Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself. New York: Redfield, 1855, 142-76, 214-45; The Lost Museum. Cindy Lobel, “’Out to Eat’: The Emergence and Evolution of the Restaurant in Nineteenth-Century New York City,” Winterthur Portfolio (forthcoming); Catherine Voorsanger, "From the Bowery to Broadway: The Herter Brothers and the New York Furniture Trade," in Katherine Howe, Alice Frelinghuysen, and Catherine Voorsanger, Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age. New York: Abrams, 1994, 56-77.

Lunch with Guest Instructor Katherine Grier

Afternoon: Conferences and Research (Jaffee and Grier)

Tuesday, July 19
Morning: Visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Nineteenth-Century American Period Rooms and Decorative Art Galleries with Amelia Peck and Katherine Grier. 

Lunch: Walk across Central Park. 

Afternoon: Discussion of Central Park and field of landscape studies. Recovery of African-American community of Seneca Village. Readings: Morrison H. Heckscher, Creating Central Park (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Frederick Law Olmsted, "Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns," Journal of Social Science 3 (1871): 1-36; Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988, 121-50, 340-69.

Wednesday, July 20
Morning: Seminar with Katherine Grier on the emergence of the parlor and “parlor making” with artifacts and texts. Readings: Kenneth L. Ames, "Meaning in Artifacts: Hall Furnishings in Victorian America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9 (Summer 1978): 19-46; Katherine Grier. Culture and Comfort: Parlor making and Middle-class Identity, 1850-1930.  Rochester: Strong Museum, 1988, 19-80; John Davis, “Children in the Parlor: Eastman Johnson's "Brown Family" and the Post-Civil War Luxury Interior,” American Art 10 (Summer, 1996): 51-77.

Afternoon: Conferences and Research (Jaffee and Grier).

Thursday, July 21
Day Trip with Katherine Grier and Amelia Peck to Alexander Jackson Davis’s Gothic Revival Lyndhurst (begun 1842, completed 1868) in Tarrytown, New York, as well as the Trevor family’s Glenview (1877) that is now part of the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York.  Readings. Amelia Peck, Lyndhurst: A Guide to the House and Landscape. New York: National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1998; Andrew Jackson Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses. 1850, reprinted by Dover, 1969 and others, 1-38, 135-142, 257-270. 

Friday, July 22
Morning: Digital Workshop

Afternoon: Conferences and Research

Saturday, July 23
Optional Trip to Green-Wood Cemetery.

WEEK FOUR

 Guest  Instructor Joshua Brown; Guest Faculty Edward S. Cooke, Jr.
Topic: New York, 1860-1900

Monday, July 25
Morning: Seminar with David Jaffee on metropolitan New York City: the city as an immigrant city; downtown and uptown; new institutions of culture such as art museums and new sites of consumption such as department stores. Readings: David Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002, 134-57, 217-250; William Leach, Land of Desire (New York: Vintage, 1994), 15-111; Elizabeth Cromley, Alone Together; A History of New York’s Early Apartments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990, 104-71.

Lunch with Guest Instructor Joshua Brown

Afternoon: Conferences and Research (Jaffee and guest instructor Brown)
Optional Session with Brown on developing digital resources for studying and teaching material and visual culture (Picturing U.S. History and others). Readings: Jaffee, “Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye”: E-Supplements and the Teaching of U.S. History,” Journal of American History, 89 (March 2003), 1463-82.

Tuesday, July 26
Morning: Visit to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Tour of 97 Orchard Street and its apartments. Behind the scenes tour of Museum collections with David Favarolo, Director of Curatorial Affairs. Readings: Andrew Dolkart, Biography of a Tenement House in New York City.  Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2006. 

Afternoon: Conferences and Research. Presentations of Participant Projects

Wednesday, July 27
Seminar with Joshua Brown on New York as producer and tastemaker of illustrated print culture. Readings: Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life and the Crisis of Gilded Age America.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 131-69; Bryan Le Beau, “Art in the Parlor: Consumer Culture and Currier and Ives,” Journal of American Culture 30 (March 2007): 18-37; Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, 45-85; Neil Harris, "Iconography and Intellectual History: The Halftone Effect." In Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America, ed. Neil Harris. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990, 04-17.

Afternoon: Visit to the Print Room, New-York Historical Society with Joshua Brown

Evening: Closing Banquet

Thursday,  July 28
Day Trip to Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

Morning: Hands-on workshop with Edward S. Cooke, Jr. in the Art Gallery Study Collection of furniture and silver. 

Afternoon: Seminar with Cooke on aesthetic consumption and fin de siècle material culture. Readings:  Cooke, "The Study of American Furniture from the Perspective of the Maker," Perspectives on American Furniture, Ed. Gerald W. R. Ward. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988, 113-126; Roger B. Stein, Artifact as Ideology: The Aesthetic Movement in its American Context,” and Marilynn Johnson, “The Artful Interior, in In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement ed. Doreen Bolger Burke et. al New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986, 22-51, 110-41; Harriet Prescott Spofford, Art Decoration Applied to Furniture. New York, 1878. sel.

Friday, July 29
Presentations.  Planning for follow-up with wiki and conference presentations.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has designated this institute as part of its “We the People” initiative, designed to encourage and enhance the teaching, study, and understanding of American history, culture, and democratic principles.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.