Cultural History

"Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted."

Decades before social media, Sontag (b. Jan 16, 1933) wrote brilliantly about our "aesthetic consumerism" of images

VIRGINIA WOOLF Three Guineas, 1938 Photographs, of course, are not arguments addressed to the reason; they are simply statements of fact addressed to the eye. But in that very simplicity there may be some help.

History is written by the victors, but also by the scrapbookers, the collectors, the keepers, the pack rats. By those who show up, at the beginnings of things and with the right technology. History sometimes comes in pieces. It needs to be reassembled. Pasted and coaxed. Sometimes the finished product still has holes.

In one corner of the climate-controlled manuscript division, on a series of otherwise empty shelves, sits Lilli Vincenz’s unprocessed collection. ...

Twelve boxes. Cream-colored. Heavy. Inside: meticulous fragments of the gay rights movement of the latter half of the 20th century. Political pamphlets, sociological surveys, photographs and obituaries. Diaries of a young woman who was nervous about going into her first gay bar but whose Arlington living room later became the default place for gay women to feel at home.

blackhistoryalbum: “ BUFFALO SOLDIER A studio portrait of an unidentified African American soldier posing with buffalo hide. ca. 1860-1880. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and...

In January of 1938, the Lithic Laboratory for the Eastern United States was founded at the Ohio Archaeology and Historical Society, now the Ohio Historical Society. An article in Museum Echoes, the Society's newsletter, of the same month proclaimed its purpose: “to study the lithic materials (stone, flint, etc.) pertinent to the material culture of the American aborigines, and of methods and techniques employed in their utilization.” The article went on to explain that the reason for embarking on this initiative was simply that such a study had  “been sadly neglected” by the field of archaeology prior and that finally undertaking it would help “throw light on the origin, relationships, migrations and trade routes of the ‘first Americans.’” An understanding of these “methods and techniques” and thereby the peoples that employed them was to be achieved by experimentation with flintknapping. While the basics of stone artifact production were known at the time, “the more refined techniques… continue to defy present-day skill.”