1

Jen Glaze
Dr. McCleary
Short Essay #5
March 28, 2022

Nineteenth Century Material Culture

The material culture of nineteenth-century America represents a shift in individual

representation. How do we understand people’s objects, and what do they represent? What

objects do we obtain that convey our own sense of individuality? I, a twenty-first-century

inhibitor, would say that my hair clip, a handmade mug painted with the solar system, cluttered

antique bookshelf, and the blanket that sits on my mass-produced IKEA couch represent my

sense of individuality within my home. The nineteenth-century presented a growing economy

with a development of mass production. Thus, mass production provided individuals with mass

produced goods such as textiles, furniture, dishware, clothing, and so on. Though, not all class

systems or individuals found the ability to obtain such goods. The Victorian era middle class

gained ideas and had access to goods through women’s advice books and articles, Sears Roebuck

& Company catalogs, and even country stores and county fairs, as depicted in Thomas J.

Schlereth’s article, “Country Stores, County Fairs, and Mail Order Catalogues: Consumption in

Rural America.” Yet, Tiya Miles approaches nineteenth-century material culture through a

different lens — one thriving in femininity, family relations, and lives of the enslaved. Through

this range of material culture, one may consider the items we keep. This essay will explore three

works, Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family

Keepsake, Katherine Grier’s Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity,

1850-1930, and Thomas J. Schlereth’s article, “Country Stores, County Fairs, and Mail Order

Catalogues.” These works explore material culture as a sense of identity making, and allow us to

question: how do objects, mass-produced or not, create identity?

 2

What sentiment do we bestow upon items? Tiya Miles approaches this question in All

That She Carried by noting, “We save first that which we value most.”1 Unfortunately, the

history of enslavement creates a gap in history, one lacking archival records and a lack of names.

Yet, material culture provides historians with further examination of the history of the enslaved.

A key point that Miles makes regarding material culture is one that exemplifies gender relations.

She states, “While free men have historically owned and passed down ‘real’ property (especially

in the form of land), women have typically had only ‘moveable’ property (furniture, linens) at

their disposal.”2 However, when we consider Ashley’s sack, packed hastily due to Ashley’s

selling to a new family, we must also consider the items in the sack and the sack itself once Ruth

gains possession of it. The tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans, and a braid of Rose’s hair

represent items Ashley possibly needed and could use. The hair, which strikes me most,

represents the sentiment one has to hair — but culturally and emotionally. The sack itself,

embroidered by Ruth’s hands in the twentieth century, represents an act of love. With

embroidery, one has to take time to thread the needle through fabric, knowing specific methods

of embroidery stitching. Embroidery takes time. Yet, Ruth provides her family’s lineage through

embroidery as an act of love — a love that transcends through generations. We use Ashley’s sack

to not only determine family lineage and relations but also to dictate the items one may have

possessed as an enslaved individual. With a lack of records, we turn to objects to piece together

the past and consider the possibilities in which objects can tell a previously untold story.

The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) exemplifies the

work of material culture and the enslaved. Their website states their purpose is to “advance our

historical understanding of the slave-based society that evolved in the Atlantic World during the

1
Miles, Tiya. All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. (New York: Random
House, 2021), 20.
2
Miles, All That She Carried, 27.
 3

colonial and ante-bellum periods.”3 As mentioned in the previous paragraph regarding All That

She Carried, historians often seek material culture to dictate the past. Archaeology, a study that

observes the past through items left behind, relies on material culture. With sites such as the

DAACS, historians may further uncover untold stories through digital archives and material

culture to demonstrate the range of objects that tell nineteenth-century American history.

Looking to another perspective of nineteenth-century America, one also characterized

through objects but containing more historical records, we turn to Katherine Grier’s Culture and

Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850-1930. Parlors, containing gaudy

wallpapers and mass-produced furniture as seen through Sears Roebuck & Company catalogs,

highlight homes as a class-conscious entity. Through Grier’s book in conjunction with Miles's,

one may find the vast differences in sources. While Miles’s work specifically looks to Ashley’s

sack and faint traces in the historical record, Grier focuses exclusively on a vast number of

catalog records to depict a Victorian parlor. The parlor “intended to serve as the setting for

important social events and to represent the civilized facade of its occupants.”4 Yet, as the parlor

represented class and social dynamics of the Victorian period, it also contained what Victorians

labeled the “decorative arts” — furniture, textiles, ceramics and glass, silver, and all the other

ornamental yet functional objects that filled their rooms, which were an integral part of the group

of symbols contained within the larger symbol of the home.5 These utilitarian objects, their

materials and workmanship, were products of advancing technology of the nineteenth-century.

Their forms and aesthetic qualities also “expressed the highest human intellectual faculties, just

as did the ‘fine arts’ of painting and sculpture.” 6 Parlor and homemaking also represented a
3
The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, “About DAACS,” Accessed Mar. 28, 2022,
https://www.daacs.org/aboutdaacs/
4
Grier, Katherine C. Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850-1910. (Washington
D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2010), 2.
5
Grier, Culture and Comfort, 18.
6
Grier, Culture and Comfort, 18.
 4

haven for middle-class women. For women, the home was an entity, one that provided women

with a defined role with decorating and servicing. One may grasp the differences between the

Victorian parlor and Ashley’s sack — one containing a higher number of goods which may also

contain a sense of sentimentality, but another with less goods and a deeper sense of sentiment.

To Grier, “catalogs reveal the identities and realities of parlor making in middle-class

households as consumers balanced their budgets and dreams to create a representation of their

desired public facade in a private room.”7 In what other ways did individuals purchase their

goods? Thomas J. Schlereth’s “Country Stores, County Fairs, and Mail Order Catalogues” looks

to rural communities, ones possibly out of reach to urban centers, to demonstrate how other

parties obtained objects. Schlereth discusses three agencies of change — the country store,

country fair, and mail order catalog — to highlight consumerist ideologies, even in rural areas,

and show ways in which rural America still nonetheless required following suit with trends and

social arrangements.8

Thus, the three works provide a detailed look into nineteenth-century America. One may

dictate a lack of material records and understand social, cultural, and economic qualities that lie

within material objects. How do we look at a handmade sack versus mass-produced objects to

determine how people obtained objects? We conclude by acknowledging the range of access, or

the lack thereof. Understanding the past means also looking at objects, even the smallest, to

consider meaning. We keep for various reasons. We keep for sentiment or to follow a

mass-produced trend. Nineteenth-century America, with its evolution of production to some,

evokes a study of keeping and allows us to further question: why do we keep the items we keep?

7
Grier, Culture and Comfort, viii.
8
Schlereth, Thomas J. “Country Stores, County Fairs, and Mail Order Catalogues: Consumption in Rural
America,” in Simon Bronner, Ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920,
347.
 5

Works Cited

The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, “About DAACS,” Accessed Mar.
28, 2022, https://www.daacs.org/aboutdaacs/

Grier, Katherine C. Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850-1910.
(Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2010).

Miles, Tiya. All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.
(New York: Random House, 2021), 20.

Schlereth, Thomas J. “Country Stores, County Fairs, and Mail Order Catalogues: Consumption
in Rural America,” in Simon Bronner, Ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and
Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920.