First Semester Supports and Best Reads
The practices and tools that supported me last semester as well as the best books and articles I read.
First of all, happy 2025! I hope you had as restorative of a holiday season as possible. I intended to be in your inbox throughout the break, but my therapist told ME to take a BREAK and I LISTENED. It’s been so nice to rest, catch up with family and friends, and not do much work the last few weeks. But, the new semester is here and as it starts up, I wanted to make sure I sent through the other missives I told you I would. This email is full of the practices and tools that supported me last semester as well as the best books and articles I read. As I can, the books and articles mentioned are linked here on this Are.na board or in my Bookshop.
Enjoy!
Supportive Practices + Tools
Let me preface this by saying, this is just what I do/used. This is not herbal, medical, or any other kind of advice. I also am not getting deep into contraindications or anything like that for the herbal products and supplements shared here (as well as for anything shared here tbh) so if you want to take anything from this list into your own life, do your own research first!
After my first week of classes, I knew I needed a non-caffeinated option that would be supportive for focus and energy. Enter in Ting by Moon Juice.
From their website:
“Ting™ is your non-stim wake up call. B vitamins are crucial for energy, metabolism, and mood. Our Ting B Complex supplement, extracted from organic Tulsi and Guava, provides cofactors to help convert fat, protein, and carbs into cellular currency/ATP. Methylated B12 supports healthy serotonin levels and Adaptogenic Ginseng brings the calming energy. Instantly dissolves in water, tastes like mango, and sweetened with organic monk fruit.”
It did just that. I used Ting most often when I had classes that ran into the evening or when I was tired in a class but had already had my caffeine for the day. It provided me with focused energy that enabled me to stay awake, alert, and engaged in the class discussion.
10/10 would recommend. It tastes great too.
PS. The sticks are super easy for on-the-go use!
Pilates/Solidcore
A few years back, I discovered that my body responds really well to low-impact workouts. So I started walking and practicing pilates as forms of low-impact movement that I know I can commit to and make me feel good.
I’ve flirted with Solidcore off and on the last few years, but this semester I was committed. I went twice a week most weeks and even though it never got easier per say, I really enjoyed myself. Going after class was a cheat code that made scheduling my Solidcore sessions a lot easier and also helped me somatically move through any energy that may have come up and been lingering from said class.
This year, I am going to give mat pilates a try mostly because I’m tired of all of the rules around Solidcore like having to cancel 10 hours before class in order to not lose your credit and the studio here is just so popular, which is great for them but means that finding class times that work with my schedule can sometimes be hard. Plus, Youtube is free and pilates started on the mat, so I’m curious to engage with it at or via its roots.
A Morning Routine
I did not stick to this every single day because I’m human, but most days my most basic morning routine consists of morning pages (thank you Julia Cameron), writing down what I’m grateful for + affirmations and pulling cards. There are a lot of other things I sometimes do in the morning if I need to but journaling and pulling cards are the staples of my routine to the point where if I skip too many days, I will notice and get called right back the page and my decks.
I love the Midori A5 Blank notebooks for journaling. I have a lot of decks for pulling cards covering everything from affirmations, herbalism, rest, etc. Not going to get into the specifics here because the decks you pull from should have a personal resonance with you so you should find your own, but as a grounding practice, no notes. Pulling cards always leaves me with a nugget to carry into my day and journaling clears the channel.
This me-time is so important. Ideally, I wouldn’t talk to anyone before 10 or 11 AM and most days, thankfully I do not.
Scent + Music Memory
I’m sure there is science behind this that I’m not going to go look up right now. The long and short of it is that I burn the same candle (or candles depending upon my mood/what I’m doing) and listen to the same music when I’m working aka when I’m writing, reading, and working in my studio.
Activating the same scent and playlist grounds me in the moment and also signals to my brain and body that I am doing a particular task. They help me arrive to and stay in the work.
If you don’t have routines that ground your practice, develop them. I also usually have the same hoodie on when I’m writing a paper or writing for class and it all actually helps.
Regular Therapy
Life, doctoral programs, and creative practice are and can be stressful. Regular therapy sessions help me process whatever is coming up, teach me how to reframe any not useful thoughts, provide me with coping skills, and hold space for me to envision how I want my life to feel.
Acupuncture
I’ve been going to acupuncture for a few years now and the best way I can describe how I feel after the session is done is that my body has come home to itself. Acupuncture for me (and maybe in general but don’t quote me) is great for stress and body tension relief. I always just feel so calm mentally, loose physically, and at home spiritually after an acupuncture session. I go about once a month because I’m now in maintenance mode, but when I first started I was going every week to get back to equilibrium.
Chiropractic
This is very similar to acupuncture. But, as someone who spends a lot of time at a desk, even with all of the ergonomic keyboards and desk chairs, sometimes my body just gets out of wack. So, I go and get adjusted. Chiropractic care for me is especially supportive for any shoulder, back, or hip pain (from all of the sitting, typing, and reading!!!). I also go about once a month.
In 2025, I’m committed to getting on my yoga mat more because I used to have a robust asana practice and then fell off as one does sometimes. My chiropractor has told me repeatedly that stretching + just getting up every hour when I’m at my desk working will help so much with how I feel. Here’s to acting on the knowledge I’ve been given this year!
Regular meetings with faculty
I meet with my advisors + committee members at bare minimum once a semester. And honestly, the way I decide on the cadence has to do with where I am in the program and the nature of my relationship with the faculty member as well as how frequently they suggest we met. My advisors? I think I met with them both three times last semester. Sometimes these meetings are general check-ins, sometimes they are more specific.
When it comes to committee members, right now I’m meeting with them once or twice a semester. And yes, I do know who I plan to have on my dissertation committee already. These meetings are more generally about what I’m learning in classes, working on, planning for the summer, when they will be teaching next, etc. I’m still in the coursework stage of my program, so most of my focus is there, but these meetings are about building relationships, keeping in touch with folks as my work develops, and seeing what insights my committee members have for me as I deepen my practice.
I try to make it as easy as possible for the faculty I work with to support me. In order for that to be easy, they need to know what I’m up to.
I also met with faculty who are/will likely not be committee members, but were teaching classes I was in at least once. These meetings were so helpful for working through some the issues I faced re-entering the classroom after seven years away. They helped me understand the professors pedagogy, gave me a space to voice questions and concerns, and also helped me make sure I was on the right track in terms of what was I planning to write about for my assignments and more generally with getting what I needed from the class.
So basically, meeting with faculty whether advisors, committee members, a professor you have a class with that semester, or a professor you want to get to know is crucial. Good relationships with program/department/college staff are important too.
I’ve had this clock for a few years now and it just provides such a gentle way to wake up. I love the variety of alarm sounds and how natural they are as well as that the alarm has a form of snooze built in (though I really need to just be hopping to it).
I don’t use a ton of the other features like the sounds and meditations as much anymore (I did when I first got the clock), but maybe in 2025 I’ll check more of them out. I love this clock so much I have a second one for when I travel.
10/10, no notes.
I’m not sure anymore where I came across these. But, I love flower remedies because they work energetically to support you in moving past any blocks or limiting beliefs. I have worked with flower remedies for yearssss and Alexis Smart simply makes the best flower remedies in my opinion. First Aid Kit is a staple and then you should pick any other remedies based on whatever you want to work with in your life at the moment. She recommends working with one remedy for three months in order to really see a shift.
I always get the glycerin option and the First Aid Kit sprays are again perfect for on-the-go use. At the first sign of stress, I take some and it really does help.
This semester I worked with Brain Drops, often taking a droppers worth when I sat down at my desk to work and sure enough it did help with focus. I will probably continue to work with Brain Drops this semester as well, but we’ll see. I might pick another remedy to share space with.
Meal Prep
I try my best to meal prep once a week. I was pretty good about it this semester. I only missed if schoolwork was out of control or if I wasn’t feeling well. Thankfully, I live with family so there is always someone else who can cook if I’m not able to.
Big hits for my meal prep include dense bean salads, homemade granola and toasted apples for breakfast, tofu scramble, regular salads, fish/seafood, etc. I eat mostly whole, organic foods, and am mostly plant based. Life is meant to be enjoyed though, so everything in moderation!
Here’s the dense bean salad that I vibe off of most often. I made the Spicy Chipotle chicken one and really enjoyed that as well! So easy and nutritious.
My herbal and vitamin supplement rotation
I pretty much work with the same herbs. I am not a person or herbalist that is interested in trying every new thing. I like to find what I like and stick with it until it no longer serves me.
For stress and anxiety:
I work with skullcap and Olly’s Goodbye Stress gummies. This combination has supported me for YEARS.
For working with inflammation + supporting immunity:
I drink golden milk, take a spoonful of garlic honey a day, and work with elderberry.
I mix up my own golden milk with tumeric, cacao, coconut cream, black pepper, and cinnamon. The cacao and coconut cream I get from Anima Mundi, the other ingredients I grab at the grocery store.
For liver and metabolism support:
I work with Anima Mundi tinctures, see here + here.
For brain support:
I add Lion’s Mane (also from Anima Mundi) to my morning matcha/tea/coffee.
I also take Vitamin D and C daily.
Other supports
Regular get togethers with friends IRL. I try to hang out with friends IRL honestly once a week, sometimes it happens that I see multiple friends in one week and then have no plans the next week, but its been so important to schedule in extracurricular activities with folks whether that’s grabbing coffee, going to a movie, or gathering to watching Love is Blind.
Regular catch-ups with friends that don’t live in MI. Whether over text, voice notes, FaceTime, or the phone, I schedule time to talk to my friends (if we’re talking via FT or phone call) that don’t live here. Every relationship has its own cadence, but yeah, I talk to my people in some robust way at least once a month.
I ate a lot more meat and chicken last semester and while I don’t presently plan to carry that forward with me to the same extent, I do think upping my protein intake subconsciously was supportive in terms of having the physical STAMINA a Phd program requires.
Regular spiritual practice and communion.
My support system.
Giving myself some time to do nothing and time to be by myself.
Trusting myself.
SYSTEMS. More on this in its own email + a workshop coming this summer.
Okay, that’s a lot but it’s a lot of work (weight) to be well!1
Best Reads
The thing about being in a history PhD program is that if there’s one thing I am going to do, it’s READ. In no particular order here’s a list of the best books and articles I read last semester. Where I can, I’ve linked PDFs on this Are.na board and books in my Bookshop. Rather than tell you why a specific reading resonated with me and any critiques I might have, I’m going to include the title + abstract or summary (from the book’s publisher or of the article) so that you can decide if a work resonates with you or your work for yourself.
Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot
“Placing the West’s failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution—the most successful slave revolt in history—alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history.
This modern classic resides at the intersection of history, anthropology, Caribbean, African-American, and post-colonial studies, and has become a staple in college classrooms around the country. In a new foreword, Hazel Carby explains the book’s enduring importance to these fields of study and introduces a new generation of readers to Trouillot’s brilliant analysis of power and history’s silences.”
Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World by Elizabeth A. Lambourn
“From a single merchant's list of baggage begins a history that explores the dynamic world of medieval Indian Ocean exchanges. This fresh and innovative perspective on Jewish merchant activity shows how this list was a component of broader trade connections that developed between the Islamic Mediterranean and South Asia in the Middle Ages. Drawing on a close reading of this unique twelfth-century document, found in the Cairo Genizah and written in India by North African merchant Abraham Ben Yiju, Lambourn focuses on the domestic material culture and foods that structured the daily life of such India traders, on land and at sea. This is an exploration of the motivations and difficulties of maintaining homes away from home, and the compromises that inevitably ensued. Abraham's Luggage demonstrates the potential for writing challenging new histories in the accidental survival of apparently ordinary ephemera.”
All That She Carried: the Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles
“In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language.
Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds. It honors the creativity and resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today.”
Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait by Bathsheba Demuth
“Floating Coast is the first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. The unforgiving territories along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Iñupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before American and European colonization. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved?
Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, Bathsheba Demuth presents a profound tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that human ambition has brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet.”
Dr. Demuth gave a talk on campus and let me just say that if you’re not hip to her work, you need to get hip.
Building a “Family-Friendly” Metropolis: Sexuality, the State, and Postwar Housing Policy by Clayton Howard
“This article explores the role normative sexuality played in housing policies in the San Francisco Bay Area after World War II. Beginning in the 1940s, policymakers made it easier for married Americans to acquire mortgages and excluded most people who deviated from sexual norms from the suburban housing market. Their efforts encouraged Americans to wed and pulled many middle-class married couples out of urban centers like San Francisco. During the 1960s, city leaders used federal funds to displace unmarried residents and to make urban areas competitive with the suburbs. Redevelopment, however, never reversed suburban growth, and the uneven nature of this process created two significant outcomes. First, suburbanization concentrated large numbers of unmarried people, including many gay men and lesbians, in places like San Francisco and facilitated the sexual revolution. Second, metropolitan expansion reinforced the notion that heterosexual norms were nearly universal by creating almost exclusive pockets of married people in the newest suburbs.”
A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida by Nathan Connolly
“Many people characterize urban renewal projects and the power of eminent domain as two of the most widely despised and often racist tools for reshaping American cities in the postwar period. In A World More Concrete, N. D. B. Connolly uses the history of South Florida to unearth an older and far more complex story. Connolly captures nearly eighty years of political and land transactions to reveal how real estate and redevelopment created and preserved metropolitan growth and racial peace under white supremacy. Using a materialist approach, he offers a long view of capitalism and the color line, following much of the money that made land taking and Jim Crow segregation profitable and preferred approaches to governing cities throughout the twentieth century.
A World More Concrete argues that black and white landlords, entrepreneurs, and even liberal community leaders used tenements and repeated land dispossession to take advantage of the poor and generate remarkable wealth. Through a political culture built on real estate, South Florida's landlords and homeowners advanced property rights and white property rights, especially, at the expense of more inclusive visions of equality. For black people and many of their white allies, uses of eminent domain helped to harden class and color lines. Yet, for many reformers, confiscating certain kinds of real estate through eminent domain also promised to help improve housing conditions, to undermine the neighborhood influence of powerful slumlords, and to open new opportunities for suburban life for black Floridians.
Concerned more with winners and losers than with heroes and villains, A World More Concrete offers a sober assessment of money and power in Jim Crow America. It shows how negotiations between powerful real estate interests on both sides of the color line gave racial segregation a remarkable capacity to evolve, revealing property owners' power to reshape American cities in ways that can still be seen and felt today.”
Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party by Lily Geismer
“Don't Blame Us traces the reorientation of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party away from their roots in labor union halls of northern cities to white-collar professionals in postindustrial high-tech suburbs, and casts new light on the importance of suburban liberalism in modern American political culture. Focusing on the suburbs along the high-tech corridor of Route 128 around Boston, Lily Geismer challenges conventional scholarly assessments of Massachusetts exceptionalism, the decline of liberalism, and suburban politics in the wake of the rise of the New Right and the Reagan Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. Although only a small portion of the population, knowledge professionals in Massachusetts and elsewhere have come to wield tremendous political leverage and power. By probing the possibilities and limitations of these suburban liberals, this rich and nuanced account shows that—far from being an exception to national trends—the suburbs of Massachusetts offer a model for understanding national political realignment and suburban politics in the second half of the twentieth century.”
Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest by Andrew Needham
“In 1940, Phoenix was a small, agricultural city of sixty-five thousand, and the Navajo Reservation was an open landscape of scattered sheepherders. Forty years later, Phoenix had blossomed into a metropolis of 1.5 million people and the territory of the Navajo Nation was home to two of the largest strip mines in the world. Five coal-burning power plants surrounded the reservation, generating electricity for export to Phoenix, Los Angeles, and other cities. Exploring the postwar developments of these two very different landscapes, Power Lines tells the story of the far-reaching environmental and social inequalities of metropolitan growth, and the roots of the contemporary coal-fueled climate change crisis.
Andrew Needham explains how inexpensive electricity became a requirement for modern life in Phoenix—driving assembly lines and cooling the oppressive heat. Navajo officials initially hoped energy development would improve their lands too, but as ash piles marked their landscape, air pollution filled the skies, and almost half of Navajo households remained without electricity, many Navajos came to view power lines as a sign of their subordination in the Southwest. Drawing together urban, environmental, and American Indian history, Needham demonstrates how power lines created unequal connections between distant landscapes and how environmental changes associated with suburbanization reached far beyond the metropolitan frontier. Needham also offers a new account of postwar inequality, arguing that residents of the metropolitan periphery suffered similar patterns of marginalization as those faced in America's inner cities.
Telling how coal from Indian lands became the fuel of modernity in the Southwest, Power Linesexplores the dramatic effects that this energy system has had on the people and environment of the region.”
Urban Native Histories by Coll Thrush
“Urbanization has profoundly affected indigenous peoples. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than half of all American Indian and Alaskan Native people live not on reservations or in rural areas, but in towns and cities. According to the 2000 US census, some of the largest Indian populations are in places like Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Seattle. This study focuses on the widespread indigenous history in and of urban places to draw attention to important themes and debates in the scholarship on Native peoples and cities and to articulate a broad agenda for a new approach to urban Indigenous history.”
Lessons For A Green New Deal: Race, the New Deal legacy, and environmental justice in Detroit by Josiah Rector
The specific article is included in a larger book, here’s the abstract of said book.
“In recent years, the Green New Deal has moved from relative obscurity to front and centre of policy discussions and public debates about how to respond to the climate crisis. It has been credited with radically changing the nature of the conversation on climate change and with re-energizing the environmental movement at a critical time. All Green New Deal proposals share an emphasis on the need for governments (rather than markets) to lead the energy transition. However, they differ in other respects. This Handbook analyses the fundamentals underlying all Green New Deals as well as exploring national and regional variations.
It is divided into three parts. The first part examines the political economy of the Green New Deal focussing not just on how proposals will be costed but also on opportunities for a fundamental transformation of both national economies and the global economic system. The second part explores issues of justice, which are central to many Green New Deal proposals, including Indigenous rights, racial and gender equity, and justice for the Global South. In the third part, authors detail case studies of Green New Deal proposals and plans at the local, national, and regional level.
This book will be an invaluable research and reference volume for students and scholars in economics, politics, sociology, geography, and environmental studies. It should also be of interest to those actively involved in climate and environmental policymaking.”
A White Story by Nathan Connolly
“In the standard narrative of neoliberalism’s rise, the demise of the white social contract gets cast as universal.”
Available via Dissent Magazine.
The Uses and Abuses of “Neoliberalism” by Daniel Rodgers
“Neoliberalism has swallowed up too many meanings, making it harder to grasp the socioeconomic forces at loose today—and where viable resistance can be found.”
Available via Dissent Magazine.
What Does It Really Mean to Invest in Black Communities? by Destin Jenkins
“As the call grows to “divest and invest,” it is essential that we not exchange the violence of the police for the violence of finance capitalism.”
Available via The Nation.
Police and Crime in the American City, 1800–2020 by Simon Balto and Max Felker-Kantor
“The relationship between policing and crime in American history has been tenuous at best. In fact, policing and crime are imperfectly correlated. Crime is understood as a socially constructed category that varies over time and space. Crime in the American city was produced by the actions of police officers on the street and the laws passed by policymakers that made particular behaviors, often ones associated with minoritized people, into something called “crime.” Police create a statistical narrative about crime through the behaviors and activities they choose to target as “crime.” As a result, policing the American city has functionally reinforced the nation’s dominant racial and gender hierarchies as much as (or more so) than it has served to ensure public safety or reduce crime. Policing and the production of crime in the American city has been broadly shaped by three interrelated historical processes: racism, xenophobia, and capitalism. As part of these processes, policing took many forms across space and time. From origins in the slave patrols in the South, settler colonial campaigns of elimination in the West, and efforts to put down striking workers in the urban North, the police evolved into the modern, professional forces familiar to many Americans in the early 21st century. The police, quite simply, operated to uphold a status quo based on unequal and hierarchical racial, ethnic, and economic orders.
Tracing the history of policing and crime from the colonial era to the present demonstrates the ways that policing has evolved through a dialectic of crisis and reform. Moments of protest and unrest routinely exposed the ways policing was corrupt, violent, and brutal, and did little to reduce crime in American cities. In turn, calls for reform produced “new” forms of policing (what was often referred to as professionalization in the early and mid-20th century and community policing in the 21st). But these reforms did not address the fundamental role or power of police in society. Rather, these reforms often expanded it, producing new crises, new protests, and still more “reforms,” in a seemingly endless feedback loop. From the vantage point of the 21st century, this evolution demonstrates the inability of reform or professionalization to address the fundamental role of police in American society. In short, it is a history that demands a rethinking of the relationship between policing and crime, the social function of the police, and how to achieve public safety in American cities.”
The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification by Anne Gray Fischer
“Police power was built on women's bodies.
Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Women are treated as marginal, if not overlooked altogether, in histories of the criminal legal system. In The Streets Belong to Us—a searing history of women and police in the modern United States—Anne Gray Fischer narrates how sexual policing fueled a dramatic expansion of police power. The enormous discretionary power that police officers wield to surveil, target, and arrest anyone they deem suspicious was tested, legitimized, and legalized through the policing of women's sexuality and their right to move freely through city streets.
Throughout the twentieth century, police departments achieved a stunning consolidation of urban authority through the strategic discretionary enforcement of morals laws, including disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and other prostitution-related misdemeanors. Between Prohibition in the 1920s and the rise of "broken windows" policing in the 1980s, police targeted white and Black women in distinct but interconnected ways. These tactics reveal the centrality of racist and sexist myths to the justification and deployment of state power. Sexual policing did not just enhance police power. It also transformed cities from segregated sites of "urban vice" into the gentrified sites of Black displacement and banishment we live in today. By illuminating both the racial dimension of sexual liberalism and the gender dimension of policing in Black neighborhoods, The Streets Belong to Us illustrates the decisive role that race, gender, and sexuality played in the construction of urban police regimes.”
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
“Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women’s radical aspirations and insurgent desires.”
Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich with contributions from Ivan Gaskell, Sara Schechner, Sarah Anne Carter, and Samatha van Gerbig.
“In a world obsessed with the virtual, tangible things are once again making history. Tangible Thingsinvites readers to look closely at the things around them, ordinary things like the food on their plate and extraordinary things like the transit of planets across the sky. It argues that almost any material thing, when examined closely, can be a link between present and past.
The authors of this book pulled an astonishing array of materials out of storage—from a pencil manufactured by Henry David Thoreau to a bracelet made from iridescent beetles—in a wide range of Harvard University collections to mount an innovative exhibition alongside a new general education course. The exhibition challenged the rigid distinctions between history, anthropology, science, and the arts. It showed that object-centered inquiry inevitably leads to a questioning of categories within and beyond history.
Tangible Things is both an introduction to the range and scope of Harvard's remarkable collections and an invitation to reassess collections of all sorts, including those that reside in the bottom drawers or attics of people's houses. It interrogates the nineteenth-century categories that still divide art museums from science museums and historical collections from anthropological displays and that assume history is made only from written documents. Although it builds on a larger discussion among specialists, it makes its arguments through case studies, hoping to simultaneously entertain and inspire. The twenty case studies take us from the Galapagos Islands to India and from a third-century Egyptian papyrus fragment to a board game based on the twentieth-century comic strip "Dagwood and Blondie." A companion website catalogs the more than two hundred objects in the original exhibition and suggests ways in which the principles outlined in the book might change the way people understand the tangible things that surround them.”
Again, the articles are linked here on Are.na. Get the books from your library. We have to support our libraries!!! It is essential. If you do want to purchase a copy of a text for yourself, I do have a Bookshop page and buying there kicks a little bit back to me, but there is truly no pressure to use that link at all.
I think that’s it! Here’s my other semester recap post in which I share a paper I wrote about material culture methodologies as a tool for historians.
I’ll be back in your inbox next week with the exhibition video and gallery images from The Shape of Water because it comes down next week! That will probably be it from me for January. Two issues a month feels like the vibe for 2025 unless I find myself with more to say.
is back in 2025 though, so technically you’ll hear from me three times a month, but in different spaces. Subscribe there if you’re interested in conversations with Black women ceramic artists and curators about their working process (all of the guests work with or orbit around clay in some way).I hope you enjoyed this window into what supported me and the best reads of my first semester. Thanks for being in this space with me.
See you next week and be well until then!
more soon,
Gabrielle
Bambara, Toni Cade. The Salt Eaters. New York: Random House, 1980.