Abstract:

This dissertation is a study of the things nineteenth-century Americans collected as markers of the historical past. I argue that, while they have often been rejected as meaningless by subsequent generations, these "association items"--what the nineteenth century called "relics"--instead reflected a different conception of how historical artifacts functioned and what their purpose was. Relics were part of the historical turn of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They embodied a new consciousness of the irremediable gap between past and present and a sense of material reality as both a testament to that gap and also a means of suturing it. Relics worked to convey the past, however, in ways that were quite different from the things that came to serve as historical objects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The relic was not modeled on the scientific specimen; its purpose was not to present material evidence of the objective conditions of the past. Instead, it was modeled on an object which we may think of as entirely irrelevant to historical knowledge--the sentimental memento--and, like the memento, it facilitated a direct connection to those who had lived in the past.

The most widespread form of popular relic collecting was indisputably that focused on the Civil War, and the second section of the dissertation takes that collecting tradition as a kind of case study. The sentimental relic played a particular role in the museums and ceremonies of the Lost Cause, where I argue that it served not only to connect Southerners to the war's dead and to facilitate mourning but to transform their loss into something that could be experienced as transcendently sacred.

The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the sentimental relic's gradual eclipse in turn-of-the-century collecting and museums. Though the objects in Civil War buffs' collections were still called "relics," in fact they might more aptly be identified as "souvenirs," and both the early twentieth century's scientific museums and popular attractions such as Henry Ford's Greenfield rejected the relic in favor of other modes of presenting the past.