The New History in an Old Museum is an exploration of "historical truth" as presented at Colonial Williamsburg. More than a detailed history of a museum and tourist attraction, it examines the packaging of American history, and consumerism and the manufacturing of cultural beliefs. Through extensive fieldwork—including numerous site visits, interviews with employees and visitors, and archival research—Richard Handler and Eric Gable illustrate how corporate sensibility blends with ...

More than three thousand different images appeared on United States postage stamps from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Limited at first to the depiction of a small cast of characters and patriotic images, postal iconography gradually expanded as the Postal Service sought to depict the country’s history in all its diversity. This vast breadth has helped make stamp collecting a widespread hobby and made stamps into consumer goods in their own right....

More than three thousand different images appeared on United States postage stamps from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Limited at first to the depiction of a small cast of characters and patriotic images, postal iconography gradually expanded as the Postal Service sought to depict the country’s history in all its diversity. This vast breadth has helped make stamp collecting a widespread hobby and made stamps into consumer goods in their own right....

Ethnographic archaeology has emerged as a form of inquiry into archaeological dilemmas that arise as scholars question older, more positivistic paradigms. Ethnographic Archaeologies describes diverse methods, objectives, and rationalities currently employed in the making of engaged and collaborative archaeological research.The contributors to this volume, for example, understand ethnographic archaeology variously as a means of critical engagement with heritage stakeholders, as the basis of...

With contributions from anthropologists and cultural theorists, Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experienceexamines the culture and cultural implications of student travel. Drawing on rich case studies from the Arctic to Africa, Asia to the Americas, this impressive array of experts focuses on the challenges and ethical implications of student engagement, service and volunteering, immersion, research in the field, local community engagement, and crafting a new generation of a...

Metaphor, as an act of human fancy, combines ideas in improbable ways to sharpen meanings of life and experience. Theoretically, this arises from an association between a sign—for example, a cattle car—and its referent, the Holocaust. These “sign-vehicles” serve as modes of semiotic transportation through conceptual space. Likewise, on-the-ground vehicles can be rich metaphors for the moral imagination. Following on this insight, Vehicles presents a collection of ethnographic essa...

To listen to David M. Schneider is to hear the voice of American anthropology. To listen at length is to hear much of the discipline’s history, from the realities of postwar practice and theory to Schneider’s own influence on the development of symbolic and interpretive anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. Schneider on Schneider offers readers this rare opportunity, and with it an engrossing introduction into a world of intellectual rigor, personal charm, and wit.In this wo...

Defining Memory uses case studies of exhibits from around the country to examine how local museums, defined as museums whose collections are local in scope or whose audiences are primarily local, have both shaped and been shaped by evolving community values and sense of history. Levin and her contributors argue that these small institutions play a key role in defining America's self-identity and should be studied as seriously as more national institutions like the Smithsonian and ...

In small community museums, truck stops, restaurants, bars, barbershops, schools, and churches, people create displays to tell the histories that matter to them. Much of this history is personal: family history, community history, history of a trade, or the history of something considered less than genteel. It is often history based on the historical record, but also based on feelings, beliefs, and memory. It is neglected history.Private History in Public is about those hi...

In this new work, prizewinning author, professor, and Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski returns to the territory he knows best: writing about the way people live, just as he did in the acclaimed bestsellers Home and A Clearing in the Distance. In Makeshift Metropolis, Rybczynski has drawn upon a lifetime of observing cities to craft a concise and insightful book that is at once an intellectual history and a masterful critique.

Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge.Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form "common knowledge." Each person wants to p...

Extraordinary architecture addresses so much more than mere practical considerations. It inspires and provokes while creating a seamless experience of the physical world for its users. It is the rare writer that can frame the discussion of a building in a way that allows the reader to see it with new eyes. Writing About Architecture is a handbook on writing effectively and critically about buildings and cities. Each chapter opens with a reprint of a significant essay written by a ...