REVIEWS
“Teresa Barnett is interested in the survival of public things and personal and what they meant to people. Drawing selectively but constructively upon the evidence, episodes, and theories, Sacred Relics is a very sophisticated and polished piece of work, offering the reader a clear sense of change over time in the realm of reliquaries and their keepers. There is no single work like it in US historiography. It will be must reading in the fields of cultural, intellectual, and social history.”
— Michael Kammen, author of Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials
“In Sacred Relics, Teresa Barnett explores the variety of physical ways that Americans have created avenues to the past through history's remains. Barnett gracefully and clearly guides us through this fascinating look at material culture in America, breaking new ground she goes. This is a very fine book.”
— Edward Linenthal, author of Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields
“Teresa Barnett has deaccessioned a museum history of staged tableau and glass-encased artifacts, offering us instead a rich collection of relics dismissed as anachronistic refuse: shards of Plymouth Rock, George Washington’s coat, Abraham Lincoln’s bloodied collar; George Whitefield’s corpse, Pirate Tom Trouble’s arm, Jane McCrea’s teeth; mourning brooches, snuff boxes, buttons, and cannonballs. She trades museal provenance—the prehistory of objects—for the lived lives of relics, affective synecdoches that connect us to the past. With beautiful detail and theoretical sophistication, Barnett makes history proximate. We become antiquarians, touching remainders and relishing their resonance.”
— Susan M. Stabile, author of Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America
“As deeply researched as it is profoundly argued, Sacred Relics is a window onto the now-historical practice of relic hunting that sought to preserve the past a piece at a time—in advance of the museum and a modern understanding of historic preservation. Sacred Relics offers a new way of seeing the otherwise nondescript shards, chips of wood, and bits of metal pried from memorable things to live forever in the act of personal possession.”
— William L. Bird, author of Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes, and Curios from the Smithsonian's National Museum
“Teresa Barnett offers a carefully considered account of the creation of historical relics, objects that still occupy a special—and contested—place in the collections of museums and historic sites throughout the United States.”
— Katherine C. Grier, author of Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850-1930
“Barnett’s well-researched and carefully written book helps readers better understand the relic’s role in understanding the past and how that understanding has changed over time. . . . This brief yet stimulating book is a must-read for scholars of historical memory.”
— Journal of American History
“Barnett provides readers with an illuminating study about the history of museums and, more broadly, about the history of historical thought. In addition, she offers museum professionals an enlarged interpretative framework from which to reconsider the relic. Barnett has made an impressive contribution to the history of American museums and to the study of the practice of history.”
— American Historical Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction - Teresa Barnett
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226059747.003.0001
[museums, United States, whites, middle class, historical relics, historical objects, collecting, Civil War, sentimental token]
This book examines the tradition of collecting historical relics in the United States over the course of the nineteenth century, focusing on the practices by middle class whites. It looks at the relic as a form of representation as well as its origins in popular collecting. It suggests that historical relics are linked to the cognate form of the sentimental token, and that their function is therefore very different from the kinds of historical objects that would later be showcased in museums. It also discusses the collecting of articles from the Civil War and considers the decline of the relic in both popular and professional collecting, along with the representational norms that came to replace it. (pages 1 - 10)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Beginnings - Teresa Barnett
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226059747.003.0002
[Curiosity cabinets, Antiquarians, Shakespeare, Charter Oak, Matter]
This chapter discusses the relic’s advent as a specifically historical form of representation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in both England and the United States. It distinguishes the relic from the kinds of things that had filled sixteenth- and seventeenth-century curiosity cabinets and also from the objects that an earlier generation of antiquarians had made the focus of its historical collecting. It also describes some of the particularly prominent strands of the relic tradition, such as the collecting concentrated on Shakespeare’s birthplace and, in the U.S., the interest in articles connected to the Pilgrims and the founding fathers and artifacts made from the wood of the Charter Oak. Finally, the chapter examines the way the relic grounded its claim to represent the past in a specific conception of matter and used the simple fact of the physical continuity of matter to authenticate other less tangible forms of continuity. (pages 13 - 28)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
History's Remains - Teresa Barnett
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226059747.003.0003
[Corpses, George Whitefield, Decay, Temporality, Fragment]
This chapter uses early nineteenth-century Americans’ apparently eccentric and even ghoulish interest in the corpses of historical figures such as George Washington or the evangelical minister George Whitefield to discuss the relic’s implication in temporality and decay. Antiquarianism in general was repeatedly portrayed as an immersion in and attachment to decay, and the relic, even as it offered an instantaneous connection to the past, also often inspired reflections on mortality and a profound sense of transience and loss. Relics were of interest because they were fragments snatched from decay, but in their fragmented, timeworn condition, they were also figures for a particular structure of temporality. They exemplified what Peter Fritzsche has identified as the period’s new sense of the historical—its sense, that is, of a categorical distinction between past and present and its concomitant awareness that the past yet persisted in the present in the form of innumerable bits and pieces of debris. (pages 29 - 49)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The Sentimental Relic - Teresa Barnett
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226059747.003.0004
[Memento, Sentimental, Memories, Sympathy, Structure of feeling]
This chapter argues that the historical relic cannot be understood apart from the specifically nineteenth-century form of the sentimental memento. Like the memento, the relic was bound up with sentimental structures of feeling. It was designed to evoke “memories” of the historical past, to create bonds of sympathy between the living and the dead, and to unite the living in a community of shared feeling. Mementoes—and by extension relics—should also be understood as a material means of channeling affect. They allowed their users to physically engage with the body of the one being remembered, to merge the physical boundaries of the rememberer and the remembered, and to affirm mutual commitments. They were efficacious objects, things that could effect changes in the self’s relational world that could not take place without them. (pages 50 - 76)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The Battlefield's Remains - Teresa Barnett
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226059747.003.0005
[Civil War, Battlefield, Bodies, Pathetic, Foliage, Bibles, Blood]
This chapter focuses on the intensive collecting of relics that accompanied the Civil War. It discusses the kinds of objects that soldiers and civilians took from the battlefield in the wake of the fighting and the way they used those objects to image the war’s violated bodies and thus to refigure the meaning of the violence. Understood as “pathetic,” in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, material remnants of the battlefield could compel a bodily sympathy that affirmed ties between combatants and the home front. Foliage from the battlefield addressed the reality of bodily dissolution even as it subsumed that dissolution into reassurances of regeneration. And blood-spattered Bibles and other relics could activate the meanings attached to blood in Christian theology and could be manipulated in ways that drew on blood’s sacrificial power. (pages 79 - 105)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
“In Memory of Our Beloved Confederacy” Pathetic Relics of the Lost Cause - Teresa Barnett
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226059747.003.0006
[Civil War, Lost Cause, Confederacy, Museums, Commemorations]
This chapter examines the historical relic’s role in the memorial activities of the defeated South. It discusses the establishment at the turn of the twentieth century of museums that enshrined the ideology of the Lost Cause and the way those museums were structured around the metaphor of a collective memory cabinet whose objects could facilitate their viewers’ grief and mourning not only for the lives lost in the war but for the loss of the Confederacy’s military and political sovereignty. It further describes the ways that relics were deployed in public commemorations and rituals not only as a means of mourning white Southerners’ losses but as a means of reworking and transforming defeat’s legacy of shame and humiliation. (pages 106 - 140)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
From Relic to Souvenir: Buffs' Collecting of the War - Teresa Barnett
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226059747.003.0007
[Civil War, Veterans, Civil War Buffs, Souvenirs, Nostalgia, Tourism]
This chapter describes the relic collecting undertaken by veterans and Civil War buffs and the ways those relics were displayed in veterans’ posts, commercial venues, and battlefield museums. It argues that in these contexts, the war’s relics were used not to mourn the war’s losses or to create a sentimental connection with the past but to reinforce the values of veterans’ culture: i.e., to proffer stories of danger survived, to assert their owners’ prowess or luck in having cheated death, and to evoke the youthful exploits and male comradeship of soldier life. These particular uses of war relics eschewed the structures of sentimental feeling in favor of reinforcing new forms of male identity that were structured around nostalgia for a youthful self and focused on the continuity of an individual biography rather than a web of connection to others. They represented a turn away from the sentimental relic to the souvenir, a form that had always co-existed with the relic but that would assume increasing prominence in the mass tourism of the twentieth century. (pages 141 - 160)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The Waning of the Relic - Teresa Barnett
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226059747.003.0008
[Scientific museums, Smithsonian, Evidentiary object, Greenfield, Experiential, Themed]
This chapter discusses the waning of the relic’s cultural authority in the early decades of the twentieth century and the way it was superseded by other forms of historical representation. Curators at the Smithsonian and other so-called scientific museums attacked the relic as a kind of pseudo historical artifact—a thing that pretended to represent the past but that failed to meet the basic criteria of proper historical representation. Instead they championed what might be called evidentiary objects—historical artifacts whose physical characteristics, carefully examined, could yield hard data about the past. By the early decades of the twentieth century, in both popular and professional venues, the relic was yielding to such forms of historical representation as displays of generic objects of everyday life, period rooms, and recreated and themed historical environments. The chapter offers Henry Ford’s Greenfield as an example of many of these new modes of presenting the past and describes the shift from the sentimental relic to forms of representation that were based on re-creation rather than material continuity and on immersive, experiential interactions with the past rather than the fragmentary evocations of sentimental memory. (pages 163 - 196)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
