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ix Material artifacts of clothing and accessories serve as valuable primary sources for learning about our history. Artifacts from American Fashion presents a collection of forty-four articles of clothing from daily life that shed light on key aspects of social life and culture for twentieth-century Americans. From the automobile and Andy Warhol to the spacesuit, women’s suf- frage, and the zipper, this book explores a variety of easily digestible top- ics written at the high school level. Significant events, movements, groups, and technological developments along with economic, societal, and cultural shifts are included. Extant clothing worn by men, women, and children, housed in archives, museums, and private collections, all help tell the story of twentieth-century America, from an individual, national, and sometimes international context. Some articles of clothing are now obsolete, like paper collars, dusters, and corsets other items are worn only by select groups, like spacesuits and cowboy hats. Still, others have become mainstays of the modern wardrobe, such as bras, zippers, boots, T-shirts, and denim jeans. Covering an extensive amount of history and research, Artifacts from American Fashion uses objects of clothing as crowbars to open up twentieth- century American historical topics. Using hard facts and information on complex topics like war and politics, as well as entertainment histories, it ties large historical events and movements to individuals living in those times. Providing an easy entry for students investigating twentieth-century American history, Artifacts from American Fashion provides a comprehen- sive summary of historical events as well as current analysis. It demon- strates how objects and artifacts can be “read” as primary sources to provide greater insight into the people and societies that created and used them, showing how clothing can be used as an educational tool to understand the real-life experiences of peoples of the past. Following this preface is an introduction to the work intended to give an overview while drawing broad thematic connections between individual PREFACE