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That past seemed a simpler time after the devastation of the Civil War and the rampant
industrialization of the Gilded Age. For native-born white Protestants, nostalgia for the past
was a salve against the forces of modernization. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe
flocked to U.S. cities, presenting to some a threat to American traditions and democracy. The
United States’ entrance onto the world stage through war and trade led to the oversight of
colonial populations that, with immigrants at home, brought issues of race, ethnicity, and
equality to the fore. Subjugated peoples became subjects of study. By the 1890s, anthropolo-
gists were also paying sustained attention to Native American cultures, and systematically
investigated the material culture traditions of different tribal groups through fieldwork and
collection. Many scholars and curators involved with the collection activities acted from an
impulse to preserve the cultures they believed to be dying out and thus in danger of being
lost. Today, scholars and representatives of those various peoples point out that these same
practices reinforced racial and cultural ideologies that had originally undermined and some-
times decimated Native American peoples as they were colonized. Current national and inter-
national efforts at repatriating cultural property recognizes these efforts as forms of looting
or plundering; how modern law intersects with differing ideas of ownership, possession, and
rights in the past is only beginning to be examined.
While interest in Native American material culture often stemmed from a belief that those
cultures were essentially “dead” and not integral to the history of the United States, histo-
rians focused on the experiences of white European colonists in a belief that that past consti-
tuted a “real” American story. Though professional historians embraced the “scientific”
method of historical analysis dependent on documentary sources, other individuals, espe-
cially women, focused on the artifacts of everyday life. Alice Morse Earle (1853–1911) wrote
seventeen books on colonial life in British New England. Local and state historical societies,
many of which were founded just after the Civil War, were restructured and began collecting
artifacts as well as documents. National women’s groups often concentrated on the collection
of American relics; the Colonial Dames of America was founded in 1890, and the Daughters
of the American Revolution had a national organization by 1896. Both organizations included
in their activities the preservation of dwellings they deemed historically important. The
emphasis on buildings as biography and history and the perceived preeminence of New Eng-
land as the “birthplace” of American culture were also evident in the entrepreneurial activities
of antiquarian Wallace Nutting (1861–1941) to promote historical tourism and reproduction
furnishings and the establishment in 1910 of the Society for the Preservation of New England
Antiquities (now Historic New England).
In the 1920s, the nation’s wealthy underwrote private and public collections and historic
preservation. Automaker Henry Ford (1863–1947) began collecting historic buildings and arti-
facts for his re-creation of American everyday life now called the Henry Ford Museum and
Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. Wealthy collector-philanthropist John D. Rocke-
feller, Jr. (1874–1960) provided funds in 1927 to restore what is now Colonial Williamsburg
in Virginia. Extant museums shifted collecting policies from the high arts and culture of
Europe to American art, sculpture, and decorative arts. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York City added its American Wing in 1924 with the help of donor and collector
Richard Townley Haines Halsey (1865–1942). There visitors could view period rooms—exhibit
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M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E I N A M E R I C A
Introduction
