Object Lessons

How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World

Sarah Anne Carter

Tells the story of the object lesson, the first teacher-driven educational fad
Places the object lesson within the context of nineteenth-century American cultural and intellectual life, providing insight into the major issues of the time
Features fifty-six images and a full-color insert
Useful for museum professionsals and docents, and teachers of material culture courses using books on the "History of X in 100 Objects"

Object Lessons

How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World

Sarah Anne Carter

Description

Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World examines the ways material things--objects and pictures--were used to reason about issues of morality, race, citizenship, and capitalism, as well as reality and representation, in the nineteenth-century United States. For modern scholars, an "object lesson" is simply a timeworn metaphor used to describe any sort of reasoning from concrete to abstract. But in the 1860s, object lessons were classroom exercises popular across the country. Object lessons helped children to learn about the world through their senses--touching and seeing rather than memorizing and repeating--leading to new modes of classifying and comprehending material evidence drawn from the close study of objects, pictures, and even people. In this book, Sarah Carter argues that object lessons taught Americans how to find and comprehend the information in things--from a type-metal fragment to a whalebone sample. Featuring over fifty images and a full-color insert, this book offers the object lesson as a new tool for contemporary scholars to interpret the meanings of nineteenth-century material, cultural, and intellectual life.

Object Lessons

How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World

Sarah Anne Carter

Acknowledgments
Prologue: A Box of Ideas

Introduction: Reason from Things

Chapter I: Windows and Ladders

Chapter II: Thinking with Things

Chapter III: Picture Lessons

Chapter IV: Object Lessons in Race and Citizenship

Chapter V: Objects and Ideas

Epilogue: Method over Matter in the Twenty-First Century Classroom

Bibliographical Essay: Object Lessons in the Archives
Selected Bibliography
Notes
Index

Object Lessons

How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World

Sarah Anne Carter

Author Information

Sarah Anne Carter is the curator and director of research at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee. She has published, lectured, and taught courses on material culture, museum practice, and American cultural history. At Chipstone, Carter has collaboratively curated many innovative exhibitions, including Mrs. M. ---- 's Cabinet, and directs Chipstone's Think Tank Program in support of progressive curatorial practice.

Object Lessons

How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World

Sarah Anne Carter

Reviews and Awards

"Blending intellectual and cultural history with material and visual analysis, Sarah Anne Carter's Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World reveals new perspectives on how American educators used material knowledge to provide children with the language and thinking skills needed to navigate the social turmoil of industrialization, urbanization and race relations." -- P.J. Carlino, Parsons School of Design, Journal of Design History

"Moving between Europe and North America, [Carter's] work concretizes abstract notions about the international circulation of ideas and practices. As is proper for a book about object lessons, its heart lies in the material: the volume boasts more than fifty illustrations, almost half of them gorgeous colored plates... It is an homage to the book's argument and subject matter to say that this is a book worth acquiring even if just for the illustrations." -- Karen Sánchez Eppler, Amherst College, Winterthur Portfolio

"This is a short, persuasive book important for education historians and all historians interested in the turn to material culture of the early twentieth century." -- Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, University of Minnesota, American Historical Review

"Carter's work is most nuanced when it addresses the complications of race, class, and gender in the conceptualizations and goals of the "object lessons" and how their practitioners perceived their efforts. When she teases out the intentionality underlying the pedagogy of teaching with and through objects, Carter shows how people can learn from objects and how this pedagogy was used in past centuries to excite learning, generate deep thinking, and at the same time train the bodies and minds of those who learned through its sensory approach." -- Diana B. Turk, New York University, Journal of American History

"This short read is the result of ten years of work at noted institutions consulting with skilled professionals. It contains 143 pages of text with the remaining 56 pages made up of an index, some rich footnotes, and a large selected bibliography. The book is well researched and documented" -- Debbie SchaeferJacobs, History of Education Quarterly

"Carter's book is accessible, evovative, and engaging...[it] contributes to the fields of American studies, American history, and the history and foundations of American education." -- John H. Bickford III, The History Teacher

"A major contribution to the history of education and the material culture of childhood, this book is one of the few to show how an educational theory was implemented in actual classrooms. Much more than a study of the first modern educational fad, this work explores the Americanization of European educational ideas, the use of object lessons in racial socialization, and how a largely forgotten vocabulary shaped nineteenth-century political discourse." --Steven Mintz, author of Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood

"In this terrific book, Sarah Carter takes us back to a nineteenth-century world, now almost entirely forgotten, where ideas were taught with things and 'object lessons' were not simply metaphoric. And in taking us on this journey she raises all sorts of questions about how we teach, how we learn, and how we know. Really smart."--Steven Conn, author of Do Museums Still Need Objects?

"Sarah Carter has written a learned intellectual history of the nineteenth-century foundations of material culture theory. Attentive to the desire of educators to use real objects to promote critical sequential thinking, the mid-century fascination with taxonomical classification of the natural and manufactured world, the moral underpinnings of thinking with and through objects, and the use of object studies as a form of racial objectification, this volume delineates clearly the complex, often fraught, relationship between thinking and 'thinging.' Carter sees object lessons as both method and metaphor, system and justification, truth and fiction. As result of this study, the material turn in art history, literature, and history can now be more fully understood."--Edward S. Cooke Jr., Charles F. Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Yale University