‘76 Objects

Daniel Story
And how do you say this word, semiquincentennial?

Sarah Weicksel
Semiquincentennial.

Daniel Story
Is that right?

Sarah Weicksel
Yep, that’s how you say it. We can just call it the 250th, though.

Daniel Story
Right, I was hoping to get someone other than me on the record pronouncing it, so you’ve done that now.

Sarah Weicksel
Yeah, well, I’ll probably say it wrong when you actually…

Daniel Story
I’m Daniel Story, and this is History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. This July marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the United States Declaration of Independence, and in recognition of that milestone, the AHR’s June 2026 issue is devoted in its entirety to exploring the material culture of the revolutionary era. Titled ’76 Objects, and edited by AHA executive director and material culture historian Sarah Weicksel. The issue contains more than 60 individual contributions from historians in a variety of places and contexts, each of whom are writing about a particular object and its significance for the history of the revolution, and for the first time the issue from back to front is in full color. So for this episode, and by the way, it’s the last episode of season four. I spoke with Sarah about ’76 Objects, and along the way we hear from a handful of the issue’s contributors on the objects they wrote about. At the start of the issue, you’ll read Sarah’s introduction, and that’s where I began in our conversation with something that caught my eye that she wrote about from her time studying material culture at the Winterthur program at the University of Delaware. Yeah, so I was intrigued by the story that you relayed at the end of your article, and I wondered if you could start by recounting that. I’m talking about the one where you and a colleague, Nicholas, analyze these 18th century desks.

Sarah Weicksel
Sure, so this was while I was a student at the Winterthur program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware.

Daniel Story
Right.

Sarah Weicksel
And so this was almost 20 years ago at this point, but it is an experience that has really stuck in my mind, less about the sort of processes that we went through to identify all this information, more because of the questions and the realizations that emerged from it, so we basically spent a few months studying several desks in the collection, so that we could update the object records for the museum, but also so that we could really learn the ins and outs of craftsmanship, and that took us to places and into conversations with people that had so much expertise that I would never develop and could never, could never develop. And some of those things that we were trying to learn, we’re trying to look at what craftsmanship techniques were used, what were the woods that were used for these desks. How do you identify varnishes and finishes that are used? All of these things are very important for museum practice. You want to know how an object has been finished and what was it has been made from, so that you know how to conserve it properly, those sorts of things. The people that we talked with and learned from included the arborist at Winterthur, who helped us better understand why you might choose certain woods over others, and the process by which woods harvested and dried and becomes ready to be made into a piece of furniture. We visited a company that produces hardware, so you know, drawer pulls and latches and all those sorts of things in a kind of 18th-19th century method, and you know, learn the ins and outs of working with brass and iron, and that sort of thing. We also talked with the conservators at Winterthur, who helped us better understand the finishes that were used and various mixtures that craftsmen would have been working with, and what their implications were. How to identify if something has been refinished, and that sort of thing, but I’m, you know, always the historian, right? And so understanding all these important aspects of the building of a desk, the harvesting the wood, the making of the hardware, and the sale, you know, the cabinet maker’s trade, all that was incredibly interesting, of course, but it’s not enough for me. I need to know more about the why and the so what to the question.

Daniel Story
Right.

Sarah Weicksel
And so that took us into some other research and identify, you know, just where did all of these things come from and it was this realization that the desks that we had studied, all of which were from the 18th century brought together materials like wood from the Caribbean and India, finishing materials that could have been in Central America, India, Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and then the actual crafting of the desks involved skills of craftsmen with ties to England, France, and Germany, in addition to the fact that they’re working in the British colonies, right. And so what really emerged from that, and that has stuck with me all these years, is the extent to which Transatlantic Exchange really permeated American society in subtle and perhaps unnoticed ways that had a really remarkable impact on American material culture and with the interiors and the furniture that people were interacting with daily, so in the end it was not all the details that I remember about these individual desks. I can go and look those up in the object records, that sort of thing.

But it’s rather that this is really a moment of objects that are seemingly very quote unquote colonial being much more part of a global moment, and they are objects that provide context in which to understand larger conflicts over trade and importation in the Revolutionary era.

Daniel Story
So this June, the AHR will have its very first entire issue dedicated to material culture, right?

Sarah Weicksel
Yep.

Daniel Story
In the AHR’s 130 year history, so this pretty big deal. The special issue is called ’76 Objects. It’s coming to us right at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it’s a revolutionary era focus. So, tell us, what is the special issue? What are people going to encounter when they get this June 2026 issue?

Sarah Weicksel
This special issue is designed to put material culture of a revolutionary era at center stage as a method of historical inquiry, so as you said, first issue in 130 some years to focus entirely on material culture, and when it arrives in people’s mailboxes or they encounter it online, they’re going to notice the differences. The issue is entirely focused on objects and essays that are interpreting them. It’s being printed in full color to make sure we are allowing readers to see the objects in as much 3D-ness as we can manage in a 2D format, but,

Daniel Story
A full color AHR.

Sarah Weicksel
I know it’s amazing, usually it’s just the cover, and in this case all the objects are getting, getting there too.

Daniel Story
Nice.

Sarah Weicksel
Because in a lot of ways the colors and the vibrance of the moment are some of the things that we want people to walk away with from this issue, like really understanding it in not black and white, and not an older look, you know, but rather to understand that this is a vibrant moment in global history, and that it is one that is still, you know, with us today when folks come to read it, they will find brief introduction laying out what the issue is and why, and the role of material culture in historical research and understanding, and then we have 60 some specific objects that are each interpreted in a roughly 1500 word essay. They take a variety of approaches examining those objects, and then there are four framing essays that are written by Ashli White, Nathan Pearl-Rosenthal, Kenneth Cohen, and Zara Anishanslin, all of whom are specialists in this area and this period, and those help to focus in on some of the larger questions about objects and scale museums labor to really dig a little bit deeper. And what we really want people to do with this issue is not only read the essays, but we want them to engage the objects too, because as I write in the introduction, you know every object has multiple stories that it can tell, and it really depends on what question you ask, which story emerges, and for each individual historian, for each individual museum goer, for every individual AHR reader, the question you ask is going to be a little bit different, and so we want people to use this as an opportunity for discovery, and you know, encourage you to ask your own questions of these objects.

Daniel Story
So, can you give us a taste of what some of the objects are? What are we going to encounter?

Sarah Weicksel
You will encounter a wide range of objects, some surprising ones, and some that you would probably expect. There are objects that are attached to very familiar figures in the history of the American Revolution. A tent that was used by George Washington, there is a chess set that was owned by Thomas Jefferson, but there’s also objects that you might not know have a revolutionary era history, like the sword that was owned by Hyder Ali, and is in the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata. There is a essay that addresses the ruins of James Fort in the Gambia, that was from 1783. There’s also portraits of a number of different people. There’s a portrait of Pacanne, who is a Miami chief. There are some essays that explore objects that no longer exist, which is something that is also taken up in Zara’s essay. How do we understand those things that are no longer with us, the absent objects as well? Some of the objects are fragments. There’s a piece of daub, which is a building material from a Cherokee cabin that was burned during one of the military operations during the Revolution. There’s also the horse’s tail from a statue of King George the Third that was taken down in New York City, and that’s a really interesting one, because it’s a story that a lot of people think they know that, that statue was taken and melted down, it was made into bullets and used in the revolution, and that is a true story, but there are other elements to the story that this tail fragment reveals, like the fact that the tale still exists. Why is that? And opens up some really interesting history about loyalists during the war. You know, this issue is really designed to capture a wide variety of objects, from fragments to very large pieces, like statues and buildings, both across the geography of the continental United States, as it is now, but also bringing in numerous objects that help to contextualize the American Revolution within the broader global context. This was a global moment, not just one that it was American, and so there’s a number of things from the Caribbean, Africa, India, Britain, Europe, number of different locations.

Ashli White
Hi, I’m Ashli White, and I’m a professor of history at the University of Miami. One aspect of objects that I sought to amplify in my essay was that they’re dynamic, that they are things are in motion, and they promote motion for the American Revolution and revolutionary era more broadly. One object that helps us to recover some of that dynamism is a cockade. A cockade is a small rosette, usually made of ribbon, that people would pin to their hats or to their gowns or their coats as a way to express it was thought their enthusiasm for a particular cause. The American Revolution, you had a cockade that was designed to reflect the cause of the American Revolution, the patriot cause. Britian’s, of course, had their own cockade. They were incredibly popular, and that popularity derives in part from the very nature of the object. It was made typically of silk ribbon, and silk ribbon was affordable. Cockades, because of that price point, because of the ease of making them, and because of their small size, were accessible to many, many people. Cockades were also tied to the military, so when a recruit enlisted in the military, one of the first things he would do was pin a cockade to his hat, it was a sign of that, and so it’s not just about political expression, it’s about a willingness to fight, and so one of the things we see is that as cockades move from a military setting into civilian ones, that impetus to act, to defend, to fight cockades were flashpoints for violence, there are accounts of people seeing an opposing cockade in the street, and then they come to blows. So it’s the fact that cockades not only are ways by which people identify, but then they act on that identification, and of course, that kind of action among certain sectors, for example, the enslaved, or for women, that becomes much more contentious, and so what seems like an innocuous bit of ribbon, a very small thing that’s an accessory to somebody’s dress, can actually open up big discussions about what constitutes equality, who has access to rights, and what does it mean to be free.

Brian DeLay
My name is Brian DeLay. I teach history at UC Berkeley, and my essay is about a little pencil portrait of the Miami leader Pacanne. This portrait, only three and a half inches by five inches, was drawn by Henry Hamilton, the superintendent for Indian affairs at Detroit from 1775 to 1778. He was Britain’s primary intermediary with indigenous allies during the Revolutionary War at Detroit. The portrait shows Pacanne sitting serenely and decked out in extraordinary silver. There’s silver across his scalp, silver hanging from his ears and from his nose, silver around his neck, silver embroidered on his shoulders, the shoulders of his linen shirt, and silver glistening from armbands clasped above both of his elbows. So the essay uses this intriguing portrait in all of the silver to explore the importance, the cost, and also the fragility of indigenous alliances during Britain’s American Revolution.

Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan
My name is Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, and I’m an assistant professor of history and director of public history at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The artifact I wrote about for ’76 Objects was excavated by archeologists from a privy pit in Philadelphia that was used by residents of the Philadelphia Almshouse. It’s a scrap of shoe leather that sits now among a collection of materials excavated from this privy pit and held by the Temple University Archeology Lab, almshouses were institutions where people experiencing poverty could receive shelter and food and medical care, and they were also carceral spaces where people were punished for crimes like vagrancy and disorderly conduct. The founders and many other early Americans believed poverty was the result of a lack of industry or morality, so they prescribed labor as medicine to cure destitution as if it were an ailment. On the eve of the American Revolution, at least 25% of the population of Philadelphia was experiencing poverty, and the number was rising. Incarcerated people and residents of the Philadelphia Almshouse made shoes for internal use for other residents to wear, and also for sale at the market. They helped to fill a gap made by boycotts on British imported shoes. The archeologists who found this scrap of shoe leather also found tools for shoe making, other portions of shoes, buttonholes, rowels, and the other kinds of materials that almshouse residents would have used in order to produce shoes. The story of this artifact can help us to understand how early Americans experienced income inequality and perceived membership and participation in social and economic life around them. Ultimately, a lot of these challenges of determining who is responsible for providing care, who is deserving of relief, who is dependent versus independent, and what the nature of the American character looks like, whether that involves industriousness, the way that Benjamin Franklin framed it, is something that is frankly still being debated today in the 21st century, and we can learn a lot by looking at how early Americans conceived of their responsibilities to their neighbors and the responsibility of the government to its constituents in the time of the revolution.

Daniel Story
I’m curious, what was the process like pulling together these objects, these, you know, authors, contributors, who would describe or analyze, yeah, what was that process like?

Sarah Weicksel
It has been absolutely amazing working with all the authors who have contributed to this special issue. They are all committed to thinking deeply about an object, and they come from a really wide range of professional backgrounds, so some of them work in museums and historical societies, others are in academia, others are high school teachers. We have a really wonderful group of historians who have brought their expertise and combined it to offer vantage points from, you know, a curatorial perspectives and teaching perspectives, so it’s been a really a great pleasure to see all the many ways in which people decided to tackle this challenge of writing an essay about a single object. One of the best parts of working on this special issue has been working with my co-editors, who are also the authors of the essay, so Zara Anishanslin, Kenneth Cohen, Nathan Pearl-Rosenthal, and Ashli White, and we had a remarkable opportunity that was supported by USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute to come together for both a public workshop and then a full day to work through all of the various submissions to think about this as an intellectual project and imagine what this special issue could look like for our readers, and the partnership with those historians and the other authors in producing this issue was just tremendous, and I also want to give a massive shout out to the production angle of this special issue, Sarah Muncy, Alana Venable, and Lauren Brand are the people behind the layout of the AHR. They make all the things happen, they bring visions into reality, and without them, and their ability to really think through this in a creative way, of how do we highlight these objects, they just deserve all of that credit. Another really cool thing that people will find when they go into the special issue, the cover itself is taken from the Declaration of Independence, and it says let facts be submitted to a candid world, and that’s our effort to bring good evidence-based history to this moment in time.

Daniel Story
Yeah.

Sarah Weicksel
And inside we’ve got some cool details, like at the end of each essay, there’s what we call a slug in publishing, and this slug happens to be a snake, and it’s the join or die snake, so readers can be on lookout for that as well. It has really been one of the highlights for me in my career, because for me, you know, material culture is kind of the way I see the historical world, and one of the things that we wanted to achieve with a special issue was to not privilege any single way of looking at material culture. Instead what we do is highlight the range of approaches through which to study a very wide variety of material objects, and so what we end up with is this really wonderful compilation of approaches to doing material culture in all these vibrant kinds of ways.

Matthew Keagle
I am Matthew Keagle. I am the curator at the Fort Ticonderoga Museum on Lake Champlain in New York State. I wrote about a gilt brass gorget in the collection of the Fort Ticonderoga Museum. A gorget being a symbolic piece of metalware worn under the neck of an officer in the military of the 18th century, the last vestige of the knights armor of the Middle Ages, and one that was used to identify both the rank of officers, but also in Europe their largely noble origins. This particular gorget is connected to an American used during the American Revolutionary War by a militia company in Boston, but in fact, although it bears this very bellicose insignia and the motto inimica tyrannis, or hostile to tyrants, it’s all superimposed over a preexisting British coat of arms, because it’s actually a British gorget that has been defaced and reused by the Americans. The significance of this is fascinating, because it shows that the object itself, the form, continued to have a certain currency as the revolution was unfolding, but the iconography of the previous regime of the British Empire has been obscured and replaced by new American symbolism, showing the Americans both retained some aspects of their connection to the British Empire and to Europe, but also simply put in their own iconography to supplant those of the previous administration, and most fascinating, in some ways, is that this really, although it layers these elements of the American Revolutionary story, it is fossilizing this moment in time during the revolution because the gorget, even as an object, wouldn’t survive the revolutionary struggle as a marker for making officers distinguishable in their uniforms, it doesn’t become part of the standard dress for the Continental Army, and so we’re seeing this object that has value, but even only just for a moment during the revolutionary struggle, as Americans are sorting out the material world and its iconography, while the revolution is ongoing, and that’s why I find this so captivating, as really a palimpsest of the revolution, which can obscure but never quite erase the past that is there, even as Americans are shaking out what their future will be.

Karin Wulf
My name is Karin Wulf, I’m a professor of history at Brown University, and director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library. I wrote about a family Bible for this issue of the AHR. It’s the Barber Family Bible, held at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and in many ways it’s a ubiquitous item of the 18th century and of 18th century Boston in particular. It was owned by the family of Nathaniel Barber, who was one of the Sons of Liberty, but what makes it remarkable, and an object that really speaks to the revolutionary moment, is not only that it holds family information, family records of births and marriages and deaths, but also it holds Barber’s account of their families fleeing from the British occupation in the spring of 1775 and their return later in 1776. He was really a radical patriot, and you can tell by the names of his children, one of them was named for John Wilkes, and one for Oliver Cromwell, and one for Catharine Macaulay, all British radicals, but also because he recounts how his wife died in the course of their fleeing the occupation. Thus, by the tyranny of George the Third, he said, did he lose his dearest companion.

Morgan McCullough
Hey y’all, I’m Morgan McCullough, and I’m an independent scholar, and my article for ’76 Objects is called Mary Elliot’s Funeral Gloves, and I’m supposed to now tell you about my object, but the thing is, there are no funeral gloves, and there are no objects in this piece, and that’s what makes it revolutionary, you see. When Mary Elliot died in childbed in 1774, it was in the midst of the non-importation movements, in which the colonists, who were unhappy with British imperial taxes and policies, said, “We won’t bring British goods into America, and we won’t buy the objects or things that we’ve grown so used to over the previous years, and funeral gloves and scarves for 80-90 maybe 100 years before had become a really popular thing to give away at funerals in mass. And Mary Elliot was this really wealthy South Carolina woman, and just a few years earlier her family would have went and bought these gloves and scarves, these British objects, but they don’t in 1774 and the gloves and scarves are, I think, extra interesting, because in the official document that the Continental Congress wrote about these non-importation movements, they list the things they’re no longer going to import, and it’s things like tea and cloth, and they list how they’re going to replace these things. They want to develop an American breed of sheep, so they can have wool. There are women, kind of newspaper articles about women trying to find what herbs they can grow to brew instead of tea, but with the gloves and scarves, the Continental Association specifically says they’re in extravagance, and they say we need to turn to frugality, and we, we won’t even find an American substitute for these objects, we just won’t do this practice anymore, and I think it’s this moment where they’re trying to maybe direct what they want the American character to be after the revolution. I’m not sure they succeed, because if you’ve ever seen an early Republic mourning object, they’re often rings and hair work, and they’re beautiful, but I’m not sure that they reflect frugality, and they’re their own kinds of extravagance, but that’s another object story for another day.

Daniel Story
Where do you think historians are these days with material culture? You quote Leora Auslanders 2005 AHR article, in which she says, “Historians are suspicious of things.” “Words are our stock and trade,” she writes. That was over 20 years ago that she wrote that. Where are we now do you think?

Sarah Weicksel
I think that in many instances historians continue to be suspicious of some things, but I think that we have also made strides in incorporating object-based research into our work. When, when she said that, she was specifically talking about academic historians, and she wasn’t saying that they hadn’t pushed at evidentiary boundaries to incorporate material culture, but rather that historians tend to view words, as she puts it, as the most trustworthy, as well as the most informative of sources, and in some ways that’s, I think, because object research can be kind of hard. It’s sometimes easier when people tell you what they’re thinking and interpret something for you through their words, or provide you with words to parse, than it can be to think about what this object’s meaning is for this moment in history that you’re studying, but what I hope is that through this issue people will see that there are so many different ways to get at that object that there are multiple opportunities to push beyond words and to bring the words back in too when you’re engaging with objects. One thing I would also say is that we’re not suggesting that historians abandon text in favor of doing object-based research, or to deny that we use language when we are considering objects, but rather to acknowledge that by bringing objects and images and other sources into our research we’re able to ask different kinds of questions that we might not have thought of before, we’re able to discover pieces that help to solve the same historical puzzles, and that by de-centering the text we can open up portals into the past as it was lived in all of its texture and all of its three dimensionality in the same way in which we move through the world in which we live today, you know, that’s one of the things that is so cool about material culture. I’ve also heard from people that they really want to use material culture, but they don’t feel like they have the expertise to do so, and that’s because the people specifically I’ve spoken to have felt like they needed to be able to go through that same sort of process that we talked about earlier about the desks, like looking at the woods and being able to identify all those sorts of things, and what I want to make sure people walk away from both our conversation here today and from the issue with is that kind of knowledge is not necessary to work with objects in your historical research, or in your teaching. It is one of the ways in which we can, and it’s a really fun and exciting way, and it’s an area that you know certain historians do focus on, but we all bring something different to our study of the past, and so I want people to walk away with the knowledge that you can work with objects, no matter what your training is in relationship to them, that they are an invitation to you, not something that you need to be focused on trying to figure out all the details. As it turns out, as I learned during that exercise with the desks, there are all sorts of people who have expertise in the things that one does not, and talking with them to learn more is one way that you can overcome the anxiety that might be produced by trying to work with objects for the first time.

Daniel Story
So there are plenty of objects, plenty of material culture being produced as we speak. For the 250th anniversary, you mentioned a few of these in your introduction. I’m curious if there’s one or two in particular that have caught your eye that you think are especially revealing about the particular moment that we’re living in right now.

Sarah Weicksel
Oh, that’s a great question, Daniel. I should preface this by saying, of course, everything has a history, and so does Americans’ ability to commercialize an event. I talked about this in the introduction, like you’ve got all sorts of ceramics and pins and other kind of memorabilia that are made in the early 19th century to commemorate the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to the United States, which is roughly 50 years after the Declaration of Independence. You have expositions and all sorts of memorabilia being produced for the centennial and the bicentennial. You could write a whole history about commemorations, and people have written histories about the objects that are produced for purchase and display during these commemorations.

Daniel Story
Yeah.

I think that of those that are currently for sale, the one that keeps sticking in my mind is the cowbell that America 250th is selling, because I just don’t know, like, what would I want to do with a cowbell that has a 250 logo on it, and red, white, and blue, like there’s that, and then there’s also like a pickleball set, which I feel like is a very 2020s sort of thing. And then others that are more expected, like there’s always going to be a platter of some sort that is made, it happen in the 18th century, the 19th century, the 20th century, and now it’s happened the 20-first century. So, there’s always a platter. There’s also a cheese board if you’re, if you want that, but yeah, the cowbell just really.. I don’t understand.

So, one of the takeaways here is the unending ability of American culture to produce consumer items to commodify these kinds of events.

Sarah Weicksel
Absolutely.

Daniel Story
Yeah, yeah. Well, Sarah, it’s really great to talk to you about this, and I’m very excited about this special issue. It’s called ’76 Objects. Should be out sometime in June 2026.

Sarah Weicksel
Yes, you should be reading it by early July.

Daniel Story
That was my conversation with AHA Executive Director Sarah Weicksel, a historian of material culture herself. Sarah edited the AHR’s June 2026 special issue titled ’76 Objects. We also heard from Ashli White, Brian DeLay, Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Matthew Keagle, Karin Wulf, and Morgan McCullough talking about the objects they wrote about for the issue, and they represent just a slice of the more than 60 different entries you encounter in the issue when it’s out later in June. History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review, in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by me, Daniel Story, and as I mentioned at the top, this is the last full episode of season four. Thanks very much for hanging with us. There’ll be a few more pieces out in the stream in the coming weeks, including a brief season four coda and two more entries in the Authoritarianism 101 series. So be on the lookout for those, that’s it for now. I’ll see you next time.