Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World

by Sarah Anne Carter

Object How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World examines the ways material things--objects and pictures--were used to reason about issues of morality, race, citizenship, and capitalism, as well as reality and representation, in the nineteenth-century United States. For modern scholars, an "object lesson" is simply a timeworn metaphor used to describe any sort of reasoning from concrete to abstract. But in the 1860s, object lessons were classroom exercises popular across the country. Object lessons helped children to learn about the world through their senses--touching and seeing rather than memorizing and repeating--leading to new modes of classifying and comprehending material evidence drawn from the close study of objects, pictures, and even people. In this book, Sarah Carter argues that object lessons taught Americans how to find and comprehend the information in things--from a type-metal fragment to a whalebone sample. Featuring
over fifty images and a full-color insert, this book offers the object lesson as a new tool for contemporary scholars to interpret the meanings of nineteenth-century material, cultural, and intellectual life.

Genres: History, American History

218 pages, Hardcover

Published August 6, 2018

Reviews

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in one sitting one sleepless night. I take the authors point that the phrase ‘Object Lessons’ has such broad currency that the topic is hard to research and I think the title of her book may mislead some readers looking for a broader discussion than this detailed study of a specific pedagogical strategy used in US schools in the C19th provides. It is no less valuable for that. Useful illustrations and reflective essay at the end.

[Sue]

Very interesting book. It made me think about current teaching methods (particularly in this time of distance education) while reading about 19th Century teaching practices. Beautifully illustrated.

[Erica]

A lovely book investigating 19th century object lessons, for all their pedagogical benefits and problems.