Gilded Ages and Gilded Archaeologies of American Exceptionalism

Archaeology’s ties to an interest in America’s natural and cultural resources, enshrined in the Antiquities Act of 1906, can be tied to the development of the presumed entitlements associated with gilded age-era conceptions of America’s cultural and racial exceptionalism. Archaeology, historic preservation, and related interests in the materiality of America’s past were in fact among the mechanisms used to legitimize America’s global emergence in the modern era. Considering elite ideas about race and a fear of “race suicide” as well as the rise of the environmental conservation and the historic house movement, this paper argues that archaeology and related pursuits of historic materiality have been regularly deployed to enforce Anglo-Saxon racial values. Explicitly formed in the historical context of mass-immigration, this dynamic is explored in a discussion of two archaeological sites in Jamaica, Queens connected to gilded-age discourse on Americanization.     

Tacking Between Black and White: Race Relations in Gilded Age Philadelphia

Despite the growing interest in archaeological studies of race there have been no investigations clearly negotiating race and/or racism in Philadelphia during the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. This reality is perplexing, given the prevalence of race and racism in the past and present. Though this article does not explicitly discuss recovered artifacts it does situate scientific racism at the University of Pennsylvania, White violence in response to Black male enfranchisement and the popularity of blackface minstrel shows as everyday practices used to facilitate racial hierarchies and, thus influence identities and relationships. Although these practices lack salient archaeological materiality the purpose of this article is to convey the bombardment of dehumanizing tactics endured by Black Philadelphians as measures to contextualize the unavoidable dynamics of racial and class oriented repression unto the archaeological record.     

The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materiality and Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age

This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparently inconsequential decorative goods and assessing how such goods were part of shared transatlantic patterns that reached beyond the Gilded Age and the confines of urban America. The paper focuses on figurines recovered from nineteenth-century sites in London and underscores how the American Gilded Age amplified many early nineteenth-century material patterns and ideological practices that were well-established in the United Kingdom and continued after the height of Gilded Age affluence. This study examines the symbolism of such aesthetically eclectic goods and focuses on the socially grounded imagination that was invested in them borrowing from dominant ideologies and idiosyncratic personal experiences alike.     

The Italian colonial cinema: Agendas and audiences

In 1997, Italy's leading politicians began the overdue process of revising the existing constitution. The bicameral commission of parliament charged with this task has proposed significant alterations to the country's institutional structure. Innovations include a directly elected presidency, an end to bicameralism and a greater role for sub‐national tiers of administration. However, this article argues that the suggested changes are in fact less sweeping than they seem, and do not address the country's urgent need to move towards a more competitive form of democracy.     

Writing sex and sexuality: archives of colonial North India

This article focuses on disparate sites and subjects to reflect on and problematize the relationship between sexuality and the archives in colonial north India. I dwell on how ‘recalcitrant’ and hidden histories of sexuality can be gleaned by not only expanding our arenas of archives, but also by decentering and recasting colonial archives. I do so by specifically investigating some of the “indigenous” writings in Hindi, through texts concerning homosexuality, sex manuals, the writings of a woman ayurvedic practitioner, didactic literature and its relationship to Dalit (outcaste) sexuality, and current popular Dalit literature and its representations of the past. The debate for me here is not about the flaws of archival uses but rather of playing one archive against another, of appropriating many parallel, alternative, official, and popular archives simultaneously to shape a more nuanced and layered understanding of sexuality.     

Climate shocks and conflict: Evidence from colonial Nigeria

This paper offers a historical micro-level analysis of the impact of climate shocks on the incidence of civil conflict in colonial Nigeria (1912–1945). Primary historical sources on court cases, prisoners and homicides are used to capture conflict. To measure climate shocks we use the deviation from long-term rainfall patterns, capturing both drought and excessive rainfall. We find a robust and significant curvilinear (U-shaped) relationship between rainfall deviations and conflict intensity, which tends to be stronger in agro-ecological zones that are least resilient to climatic variability (such as Guinean Savannah) and where (pre-) colonial political structures were less centralized. We find evidence that the relationship is weaker in areas that specialize in the production of export crops (such as cocoa and palm oil) compared to subsistence farming areas, suggesting that agricultural diversification acts as an insurance mechanism against the whims of nature. Additional historical information on food shortages, crop-price spikes and outbreaks of violence is used to explore the climate–conflict connection in greater detail.