A New Blog

Krimmel, Woman pressing and folding laundry, Downs Collection
John Lewis Krimmel, “Woman pressing and folding laundry,” 1819-1820, Winterthur Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, 59×5.5

I have been blogging about antiques and material culture since 2010, about a year after I graduated from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. I’ve found that blogging is a fun way to reflect on my adventures at flea markets and antique malls while providing readers–most of whom seem to come from the general public, though I have been cited in a published book about Italian interiors(!)–with an accessible scholarly perspective on what I observe and buy. My readers seem to dig it too. I’ve received emails from collectors asking me for my expertise on Berlin work, and I’ve received notes from people researching their ancestors who owned some of the objects I have acquired.

In addition to writing about antiquing, I have also written guest blog posts for the History of American Civilization Blog (my Ph.D. program’s blog), the University of Delaware Museum Studies blog, and the Disability and Industrial Society Blog on a variety of subjects raining from giving mini “TED” talks to cataloguing the contents of a “period room” decoy shop to how collecting disability history artifacts has advanced my research. Through these pieces, I have connected with the disability history field in Great Britain, for instance, a group of scholars from whom I have learned a lot.

I want to continue to pursue this line of blogging. So this new blog, housed on my academic website or e-portfolio, is meant to provide me with a more regular outlet for publishing my thoughts on the field (history) and what I do (teach, research, write, present, and visit museums and other culture heritage sites). I’ll still maintain the antiquing blog, of course. I simply didn’t want to clutter it with topics too far afield from Revolutionary War battle relics and why I didn’t buy a giant papier-mâché boar. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to suggest that antiquing is tangental to my scholarly work. In fact, it’s a fundamental part of how I learn about the material world I study.

So all that aside, I’d like to introduce myself to you via a John Lewis Krimmel sketch of a woman attending to her laundry around 1820. Kathleen Brown included it in her recent book Foul Bodies. There, she discusses the concept of “body work” as a central theme in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century American culture. I agree that the image, focusing on the labor involved in cleaning textiles the body used, very much reflects this idea. It also reminds me a bit of my own workflow – something going on in every corner, all the time. I look forward to sharing some of that with you.

Further Reading

John Lewis Krimmel’s sketches and drawings at Winterthur are digitized here.

You can also read more about his work in Anneliese Harding’s John Lewis Krimmel: Genre Artist of the Early Republic (1994).

If you are interested in the history of the body, cleanliness, and illness in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, check out Kathleen M. Brown’s Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (2009).

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