Reading becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835 (2024)

The Amos Spafford farmstead (33Wo50) of Port Miami in northwest Ohio disappeared from the historical record after the War of 1812. Port Miami, a Franco-American village, was the first U.S. federal customs facility established in Ohio in 1805. It was destroyed in 1812 by a British and Native American detachment led by Captain Peter Latouche Chambers (British 41st Regiment of Foot), the Shawnee leader Tec*mseh, and the Wyandot leader Roundhead. Port Miami's destruction became lost over the years to the historical memory and consciousness of Ohio. Salvage excavations of the Spafford farmstead (1810–1823) in 1977 and its history provide an archaeological window within which to view Port Miami's obliteration and its recovery to the community heritage of the state.

Journal of Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism , 2018

A small artefact collection and a substantial archival fonds from Rideau Lodge No. 25 offer an unusual glimpse into the material practices of freemasons in early 19th century rural Canada. Organized in 1815, Rideau Lodge operated for about 30 years in and around the hamlet of Burritts Rapids, in present-day eastern Ontario. Their surviving artefacts and accounts reveal how the brethren procured the material necessities of masonic ritual in the context of emerging frontier capitalism. The Rideau Lodge masons developed a hybrid material strategy, purchasing some items from distant suppliers, including those in the United States, while making or repurposing other items locally. A case study in the relationship between local production and the market economy on the Canadian frontier, this article adds to the general literature on early Canadian capitalism by illustrating how cultural considerations - in this case the practices and values of freemasonry - influenced rural Canadians' consumption strategies.

Library & Information History, 2018

This article explores the contribution and legacy of subscription libraries in relation to the development of Canadian public libraries. From 1775 to 1850 membership associations acted as public libraries dispensing educational resources and recreational reading to users on a general-community or common-interest basis. Although Canada followed familiar British and American exemplars, regional settlement, political culture, religion, and language were influential arbiters in library development. The variety, number, and collective status of subscription libraries ushered in the persistent nineteenth-century concept of the semi-private ‘public library’ administered by trustees and populated by members who voluntarily agreed to accept entry charges, annual dues, and fundraising. The collegial space provided by the subscription library fostered a greater sense of publicness in an emerging Canadian nation before 1850. It also forged numerous associative identities in localities for like-minded reading groups. Subscription library development reveals that significant attributes of post-1850 municipal public libraries were inherited from Canada's colonial library era.

Commonly regarded merely as exercise in "marking" for linens, embroidered samplers might better be considered as escritoires containing a wealth of personal, social and economic information about their makers and their milieus. This paper argues that samplers may be used to located historical cultural changes in the underlying discursive practices affecting the lives of young women. Based on typology, I identify three distinct sampler genres as linked to the historical periods of antiquity through the late Middle Ages, the early Renaissance to the late 16th century, and the 17th to the 19th centuries. This paper concentrates on the last period, examining New England colonial samplers to illustrate their value as visual rhetorical documents that reflect both the underlying Puritan cultural emphasis on universal literacy and the feminine cultural discourse of the period. In the process, I suggest that New England women achieved near-universal situational literacy by 1775, further supporting this contention with evidence from statutes, the book industry, and the rise of women's academies. From a child's first lettering sampler to the complex academy samplers that touted the virtues of Republican motherhood, samplers acted to shape a girl's group identity even as she wrought her own personality into her work. Consequently, I conclude that: (i) as often ubiquitous items of girls' lives, samplers and other embroideries should be regarded as historical documents that are uniquely reflective of cultural mores; and (ii) the methodology for so doing requires a more precise categorization of embroideries according to their discursive functions.

Boyd, Douglas K., Aaron R. Norment, Terri Myers, Maria Franklin, Nedra Lee, Leslie L. Bush, and Brian S. Shaffer2015 The Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead: Post-Emancipation Transitions of an African American Family in Central Texas, volumes 1 and 2. Reports of Investigations No. 173. Prewitt and Associates, Inc., Austin, Texas. Archeological Studies Program Report No. 139, Environmental Affairs Division, Texas Department of Transportation, Austin, Texas.Volume 1 can be downloaded at Prewitt and Associates website: http://www.paiarch.com/Williams%20Farmstead%20Report%20Info.htm

Northeast Historical Archaeology, 2009

Labour / Le Travail, 2003

Kilham, Northumberland: An Archaeological and Historical Study of a Border Township (Northumberland National Park Village Atlas Series), 2004

Wingates, Northumberland: An Archaeological and Historical Study of a Northumbrian Township and Estate, 2007

Low Row and Feetham, North Yorkshire: Yorkshire Dales National Park Village Atlas Series, 2007

Vermont History, vol. 90, no. 1, 2022

Elsdon, Northumberland: An Archaeological and Historical Study of a Border Township(Northumberland National Park Village Atlas Series), 2004

Thirlwall, Northumberland: An Archaeological and Historical Study of a Border Township (Northumberland National Park Village Atlas Series), 2006

Australian Humanities Review, 2014

This essay analyses the earliest surviving borrowing ledger from The New York Society Library , which documents the reading history of its members from July 1789 to April 1792, and the published portion of the borrowing ledgers of the Union Library at Hatboro, Pennsylvania, to suggest how ledger data can be interpreted, and how it might add to our knowledge of the popularity of Eliza Haywood and other eighteenth-century writers. The essay discusses the challenges of interpreting ledger data to establish popularity. In a series of lengthy appendices, the popularity of every novel recorded in these ledgers, is compared and ranked.See http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2014/spedding.html and http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2014/05/01/eliza-haywoods-eighteenth-century-readers-in-pennsylvania-and-new-york-appendixes/

This study engages with both the archaeology of colonialism and historical archaeology in a manner that brings them into direct dialogue with each other to explore how essentialized identity tropes are used to frame our conceptualizations of the past. The archaeology of colonialism and historical archaeology have been conceptually bifurcated along a colonized/colonizer dichotomy and continuously reified by the insertion of research into one category or the other. The archaeology of colonialism generally focuses on the experiences of the colonized within the colonial process, while historical archaeology focuses on the experiences of Europeans and/or people of European descent. This is not to say that archaeologists working on either side of this conceptual divide ignore each other entirely, but rather their foci – and subsequent discussions – rarely converge. To create a conceptual bridge between these disparate dialogues, I explore multigenerational, 19th-century sites in southwest...

Falstone, Northumberland: An Archaeological and Historical Study of a Border Township.(Northumberland National Park Village Atlas Series), 2004

Springer eBooks, 1987

Harbottle, Northumberland: An Archaeological and Historical Study of a Border Township (Northumberland National Park Village Atlas Series), 2004

Tarset & Greenhaugh, Northumberland: An Archaeological and Historical Study of Two Border Townships (Northumberland National Park Village Atlas Series), 2004

Ingram, Northumberland: An Archaeological and Historical Study of a Border Township (Northumberland National Park Village Atlas Series), 2004

Castle Bolton, North Yorkshire: Yorkshire Dales National Park Village Atlas Series, 2007

Holystone, Northumberland: An Archaeological and Historical Study of a Border Township (Northumberland National Park Village Atlas Series), 2004

Privately published, Libraries Today, 2020

Places to Grow covers the history of the development of Ontario's public library system from the Great Depression to the Millennium. It describes the growth of larger systems of service, plans in the 1950s and 1960s for a provincial library system centred in Toronto, the professional growth of librarianship, library architecture, the decline of censorship and growth of intellectual freedom, library automation, the rise of electronic libraries, the impact of the Information Highway in the nineties, and many other 20th-century issues that libraries, trustees and librarians were involved with. Originally published in 2010 and revised with corrections in 2020.

Occasional Papers of the Savannah River …, 2003

Heritage, Culture and Identity

Northeast Historical Archaeology, 2004

Whilst the North West of England was one of the cradles of the Industrial Revolution, and was at the forefront of the development of the new academic discipline of Industrial Archaeology, there is no overview of the region's industrial archaeology which deals with the landscape and social archaeology approach to the subject. This volume, the second in an occasional series on models and methodology in North West archaeology, brings together many of the leading researchers in the region to present for the first time detailed studies of thelandscape and social archaeology of the period. The volume is divided into two sections. The first deals with models and methodologies for approaching the period in North West England. The second part presents a series of five case studies from around the region which show how landscape and social archaeology models and methodologies have been applied from Cumbria and Lancashire through to Greater Manchester, Cheshire,and north-western Derbyshire. These innovative approaches allow us to look at the archaeological monuments, landscapes, and buildings of the Industrial Period from the farm to the factory.

Hethpool, Northumberland: An Archaeological and Historical Study of a Border Township (Northumberland National Park Village Atlas Series), 2004