The History of Sound

This week's readings focused on the importance of sound to the creation of space and historical narratives. Emily Thompson's Soundscape of Modernity, discussed the importance that sound played in relation to the evolution of modern architecture in major sites throughout the United States. By connecting sound as an influencer for individuals and groups to create particular architectural spaces, Thompson highlights the importance that sound plays when understanding the past and the reasons for particular changes in a society. Playing off of this area of research, Mark Smith argues the importance that sounds has in a more complete form of historical understanding of the past. In this article, we are also forced to become more introspective of our own methodologies and question why the senses are not fully utilized when historical topics are researched. Together these two works have raised questions for my own research, and how I can better utilize sounds and the other senses to fully understand the evolution of the Germantown landscape in my object analysis.

This week's reading of Bruno Latour's "Crisis," has lead me down a road of introspection in regards to my work. In this chapter, Latour argues that our strict classification of subjects into nature, politics, and discourse within scholarship blocks scholars from a complete and well rounded understanding of their subjects. This lack of understanding can ultimately lead to chaos and and inability to prevent disaster. This article seems reflective of historical scholarship and research methodology. As we have discussed throughout this semester, material culture studies and other areas of scholarship are ignored when historical research is conducted, when an interdisciplinary outlook can provide a wealth of valuable information to support one's thesis and provide a more thorough understanding of the past.

The Economy of material culture

This week's readings centered on the ways in which economics and capitalism can effect to material culture surrounding an object. In Arjun Appendai's The Social Life of Things, he details the ways in which commodification creates a cyclical environment for the importance of objects. He also highlights the ways in which we can follow how culture shifts and changes over time with the ways in which objects importance within that society changes. The importance that objects and material hold in regards to our understanding of history and culture is detailed in Stuff by Miller. Although he never truly defines what material culture means, he does highlight the ways in which objects shape our identities, and how these objects can help us to identify concepts that are difficult to define such as spirituality or commodification.

What I gained from these readings is an alternative way to understand my own objects, and it's importance within the culture of the Haines family and the Germantown area. By taking an economic stand point, I can delve into how the commodification of the Celsiana rose influences the material culture of the area. I can also understand how this rose lost its objectness as it became less of a commodity for the Haines family and the Germantown area, thereby gauging how it's surrounding culture changes as the indenting of the rose did.  

The construction and deconstruction of history through objects

This week's readings readings focused on how object and objects representation can construct and deconstruct national concepts of past events. In Ken Yellis's article Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me: Reflections on the History Wars, delves into various museum exhibitions that challenged audiences perception of historic objects and he narratives they tell. For instance, Fred Wilson deconstructed time and narrative through his exhibit Mining the Museum where he let the objects speak to him to creat an exhibit that touch upon Word and broke our linear concept of time by letting past, present and future memories of the past compete with one another. Through Yellis's insights we are left with the understanding that audiences are torn, with a large section eager to understand those aspects of history that we as a group have actively ignored or forgotten and the other angered with a narrative that breaks from the nationalistic historical narrative that museums have perpetrated for decades. [1] What this article touches on is the important role that museums and curated images and objects have in the shaping of historical understanding within a nation, ultimately linking these institutions with the task of reshaping a nation after extreme trauma such as war or epidemic. In following this theme and delving deeper into this concept is Kirk Savage's Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves:Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-century America. Savage deconstructs the ways in which the United States used imagery and monuments to rebuild a nation, and national history after the conclusion of the American Civil War. He identifies and defines the many types of national monuments that strove to exemplify this new freedom within a broken nation, while other stood to solidify the divisions that were created before and during the Civil War. [2] 

The Themes touched upon in these pieces, both publish in the late 1990s and early 2000s are still relevant today, if not more so. The national is still divided in how they want to remember the America of the past, and this is evident in the on going national debate over the representation of confederate imagery on government and public spaces. Debates such as these will not be solved quickly, but it does shed light onto the power of images and objects to evoke powerful memories and constructed memories. It also proves the ways in which a nation recovers after a wide spread traumatic event, and how these events are remembered to encourage repair and unity. As I continue in the public history sphere I hope to better understand how these objects can be used to encourage remembrance of the histories our nation has chosen to forget or ignore, while limited the instigation of anger and fear from an audience who may not want to recall these events.