A piece of Plymouth Rock. A lock of George Washington’s hair. Wood from the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born. Various bits and pieces of the past—often called “association items”—may appear to be eccentric odds and ends, but they are valued because of their connections to prominent people and events in American history. Kept in museum collections large and small across the United States, such objects are the touchstones of our popular engagement with history.

In Sacred Relics, Teresa Barnett explores the history of private collections of items like these, illuminating how Americans view the past. She traces the relic-collecting tradition back to eighteenth-century England, then on to articles belonging to the founding fathers and through the mass collecting of artifacts that followed the Civil War. Ultimately, Barnett shows how we can trace our own historical collecting from the nineteenth century’s assemblages of the material possessions of great men and women.

Teresa Barnett is director of the UCLA Center for Oral History Research, where she has worked for twenty years. She has published several essays on oral history and historical memory in edited volumes. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

— Michael Kammen, author of Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials

— Edward Linenthal, author of Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields

— Susan M. Stabile, author of Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America

— William L. Bird, author of Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes, and Curios from the Smithsonian's National Museum

— Katherine C. Grier, author of Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850-1930

— Journal of American History

— American Historical Review