People's Histories of Material Culture in the United States

“What can everyday objects that belonged to everyday people tell us about their lives?”

This question, posed by historian Laura Isabel Serna in her 2020 essay, “Material Culture and the Affective Dimensions of Chicano/a History,” frames this session.

This session welcomes papers committed to more inclusive accounts of design and national history that explore how the decorative arts, adornments, and other everyday objects have empowered or encumbered the people’s pursuits of self-knowledge, community, and equality. The session understands “the people” as “the ordinary people in a country who do not have special power or privileges” (Merriam-Webster).

Potential paper topics include objects intentionally designed to support social movements or reimagined by users for the same; the role of objects in the “affective or emotional lives” of those “whose class status and marginal political position means that their archival record may resist conventional historical approaches” (Serna); and/or objects that did not belong to everyday people but, nonetheless, impacted their lived experiences. Regarding the latter, a paper might engage objects as maintained by domestic servants, for example.

Papers that ground their meditation in close formal and contextual analyses of a single object are especially encouraged.