Encyclopedia
Helen Sheumaker and Shirley Teresa Wajda, eds. Material Culture in America: Understanding Everyday Life (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008)

This encyclopedia, with nearly 200 entries, address the history, theory, practice, trends, and “stuff” of American material culture studies. It provides a much-needed comprehensive overview of the field.

Articles, Book Chapters, and Essays

“Fashion Out of Scranton: The One Hour Dress.” With Sarah Hegge and Mary Worrall. Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America, 48:1 (2022): available at https://doi.org/10.1080/03612112.2022.2029007

“Harriet Taylor Upton’s Change of Heart.” Pathways (Spring 2020): 4-5

“Union Chapel, South Newbury: A Pulpit for Women’s Suffrage.” Pathways (Spring 2020): 21-22

“Belle Sherwin: Teaching Women to Vote—And Lead.” Pathways (Winter 2019/2020): 8-9

“Curating Craftivism and Rethinking Collection(s).” With Mary Worrall. Crafting Dissent: Handcrafted Protest Throughout History, ed. Hinda Mandell (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), 213-223

“Reference Point: MSU Libraries a destination for students, scholars, and a surprising range of collections.” Spartan: Michigan State University Alumni Magazine (Fall 2018): 30-39

“Hands On History: White Glove Service at The State Museum.” Pennsylvania Heritage 49:1 (Winter 2014): 43-48

“Mobilizing the Home Front.” Opinionated: Disunion blog, New York Times, 13 October 2012

“Martha Stewart.” Icons of American Cooking, ed. Victor W. Geraci and Elizabeth S. Demers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2011.

“The Architect and the Teakettle.” Design Studies: A Reader, ed. Hazel Clark and David Brody. London: Berg Publishers, 2009. (Google Books preview)

“A ‘pretty custom’ Updated: From ‘Going to Housekeeping’ to Kitchen Showers in America, 1850s-1930s.” Buying For the Home: Shopping for the Domestic from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Margaret Ponsonby and David Hussey. London: Ashgate, 2008.  (Google Books preview)

“Self, Collected.” Family Album: The James Rutkowski Collection of American Photographs: Essays by Michael Hall [and] Shirley Teresa Wajda. Columbus, OH: Columbus Museum of Art, 2004.

“‘A Kind of Missionary Work’: The Labor and Legacy of Cincinnati’s Society Women, 1877-1922.” A Separate Sphere: Dressmakers in Cincinnati’s Golden Age, 1877-1922, by Cynthia Amneus. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press for the Cincinnati Art Museum, 2003.

“And a little child shall lead them’: American Children’s Cabinets of Curiosities.”  Acts of Possession:  Essays on Collecting in America, ed. Leah Dilworth. New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 2003. (Google Books preview)

“Phyllis Primrose Peckham: Dressed for Posterity.” With Barry Bradley and Jean L. Druesdow. Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America 29 (2002): 59-74.

“Repo Culture.” Material History Review/Revue d’histoire de la culture materielle (Ottawa) 54 (Fall 2001): 103-13.

“KMartha.” “Martha Stewart Roundtable,” American Studies (Kansas) 42:2 (Summer 2001): 71-88; excerpted in Design Studies: A Reader (2009).

“The Commercial Photographic Parlor, 1839-1889.” Shaping Communities:  Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, VI, ed. Carter L. Hudgins and Elizabeth Collins Cromley. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997.

“The Artistic Portrait Photograph.” The Arts and the American Home, 1890-1930, ed. Jessica H. Foy and Karal Ann Marling. Knoxville: McFaddin-Ward House Museum and University of Tennessee Press, 1994; paper, 1995. (Google Books preview)

“A Room with a Viewer: The Parlor Stereoscope, Comic Stereographs, and the Psychic Role of Play in Late Victorian America.” Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840-1940, ed. Kathryn Grover. Rochester, NY, and Amherst, MA: Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum and University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. (Google Books preview)