My primary focus is on the written word, whether in pen and ink or printed, but with an awareness that this cannot be divorced from the wider material world it was used to describe. Written descriptions do not reflect the sum of knowledge about women’s clothing and textiles, and were not its only or perhaps…
Category: Life and LifeStyle
All posts are about lifes.
Intro – Describing Women’s Clothing in England
Descriptions of clothing and textiles increasingly circulated across textual genres and beyond in eighteenth-century England, entangled with an expanding world of consumer goods that has already been well traced by historians. More importantly, what did it mean to consumers themselves? Much work has devoted its energies to addressing these questions, and the response has largely…
Tourism and Taste – Eating in US National Parks
Romantic sensibilities have significantly shaped the past of the national parks, and cosmopolitan tastes stand to shape their future. Romanticism, a movement that emphasized individual self-expression, emotion, imagination, nature, and the per-sonal experience of the sublime (Swiggett 1903), gained traction in nineteenth-century Europe as a critique of the Enlightenment rationality that had ushered in the…