My Response to "In Small Things Forgotten" by James Deetz and "Building in the Wood in the Eastern United State; A Time-Place Perspective" by Fred B Kniffen & Henry Glassie

 It wasn’t until the first day of this class that I had ever really thought about how objects play a huge role in understanding a culture. The saying that comes to my mind is “maybe what you are looking for has been in front of you the whole time.” I find that to be especially true after reading the book “In Small Things forgotten,” by James Deetz and the article “Building in Wood in the Eastern United States: A Time-Place Perspective,” by Fred B, Kniffen and Henry Glassie. In “Small Things Forgotten,” Deetz chooses several objects to analyze and explains how we can learn about a culture from it. Sometimes if you’re lucky you can pick up an object and there might just be a date on it. How about that for a start? However, that is not always the case. Deetz talked about ceramics, houses, and what I thought was most interesting, gravestones and how we can analyze these objects to understand a culture.

Most but not all gravestones have the date of when a person was born and the date that they died. Having the date that they died is extremely helpful in understanding why types of gravestones, materials, and designs might have been made during that specific time. We can only assume that the gravestone was made around the date in which the death occurred. That is something that I had never once thought about but that is truly in the reach of our hands to explore and research. Deetz takes us through several carvers’ designs and the evolution of them throughout the 1700’s in the New England area. Each carver was from a different area. Some carvers may have only been several miles away but the technique they used was sometimes completely different from the other. Back then they did not have technology to communicate with one another about what they were doing or how they were making their gravestones. Think about today, once you create something new you can instantly put it online and someone from all the way across the world can adapt your idea. Do you think that in the future the objects that we use today can be studied to understand our culture too?

This past week when I saw for the first time the wedding gown that I will be researching, I got lucky! Why? Because there was a tag stitched inside the gown with the name of the woman who wore it and the date when she wore it, January 22^nd, 1856. Sometimes all we have to do is pick up something and look at it. From an article that came with it, it stated that the women was married in Lancaster, PA. I will be able to research that specific area and perhaps generate the information on why the dress was made the way it was for a woman living there.

It is these things that are right in front of us that are clues waiting to be unveiled to give us a better understanding of how and why people lived and did the things they did.