Review of Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology

Quilts are a unique medium that is deeply layered with meaning, highly gendered, intimately tied to social and cultural communities, and richly interdisciplinary. Though quilts are utilitarian in origin, their circulation and display take them far beyond the home--to art galleries, history museums, state fairs, quilt shows, and philanthropic auctions. As they move, individuals and institutions make significant intellectual and emotional investments in how quilts are classified, judged, and valued. In this highly politicized work, individuals and institutions shape public culture through debates about quilts' utility, workmanship, and aesthetics; they create and display quilts to further their cultural heritage, manifest their faith, delineate aesthetic values, reinforce disciplinary boundaries, and elevate their artistic status. This project uses four representative case studies to demonstrate the cultural work that women and institutions conduct using quilts and to explore what is at stake in that work. Through research into the Iowa State Fair quilt competition and the Michiana Mennonite Relief Sale Quilt Auction, I reveal how women employ their quilts and quilt displays to promulgate their values and shape their communities. In case studies of larger institutions--the Smithsonian Institution and the American Quilter's Society--I investigate how quilts intersect with other artistic and historic objects in their creation, interpretation, and display. Each chapter includes historical research, observations from site visits, and evidence from qualitative interviews--research that provides a historical view of each institution and an analysis of how they currently categorize, judge, and display quilts. Together, these case studies reveal that individual efforts at quilt display intersect in broader public culture, where conversations about how to value and interpret quilts are also essential conversations about aesthetics, community values, disciplinarity, and the value of women's work.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--George Washington University, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 393-413), and bibliographical footnotes.

This dissertation delineates the ways in which the political vicissitudes, economic restructuring and cultural fissures of the 1960s and 1970s shaped the commemoration of the Bicentennial of American Independence and elucidates how, in turn, the Bicentennial helped catalyze the eventual emergence of the cultural formations and political economy of neoliberalism. Using cultural studies frameworks to analyze archival policy memoranda, planning, curatorial and design records, journalistic accounts, photographs and audio-visual recordings, I demonstrate that the Bicentennial became a crucible in which Americans across the political spectrum reframed historical narratives, reconceived national identity and debated the proper role of the federal government. This study argues that political, economic and cultural elites mounted events that answered social movement demands for inclusiveness but contained their potential to effect radical change. The corporate sponsorships devised for Bicentennial projects profoundly expanded the role of corporations within the cultural sphere, enabling museums to adapt to the dismantling of the "welfare state" and laying the groundwork for the public-private partnerships that became the cornerstones of neoliberalism in the1980s. Chapter 1 examines a traveling Smithsonian exhibition, "Workers and Allies: Female Participation in the American Trade Union Movement 1824-1876," to illuminate the challenges of conducting public history in a moment when national narratives are highly contested. Chapter 2 argues that the Nixon administration imposed its overriding policy agenda of New Federalism upon the Bicentennial planning process to help engender a conservative realignment of American values and the electorate. Chapter 3 chronicles the transformation of the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife from a small celebration of deep-rooted folkways with counterhegemonic aims into a grand multicultural Bicentennial spectacle that advanced the ideological and economic prerogatives of the Smithsonian's liberal leadership, of conservative politicians, and its major corporate sponsors. Chapter 4 explores the launch and exhibition design of the American Freedom Train, which marshaled substantial economic and political resources of the federal government and four American corporations - Pepsico, Prudential, Kraftco, and General Motors. This single most widely-circulated project reasserted a teleological narrative of steady economic, technological, and social progress and affirmed the cultural authority of its corporate stewards and the success of privatization. / 2019-04-30T00:00:00Z

This report is a case study of the presentation of craft at the Renwick Gallery, the craft museum of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). The Renwick, founded in 1976, is a curatorial department of SAAM, focusing in modern and contemporary American craft. Through an examination of the museum’s galleries and exhibitions, interviews with staff, and an analysis of educational programming, this thesis explores how the Renwick defines craft implicitly and explicitly. Giving a context for this study is a history of the Renwick Gallery, as well as history of craft and its definitions. With these histories as background, the ways that the Renwick, and thus its visitors, understand craft is explored. The qualities specific to craft in the literature and manifest at the Renwick are examined in order to determine how they influence the presentation of craft at the Renwick. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 326-336). / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / xii, 336 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Virginia, 1998. / Description based on content as of June 1999; title from title screen.

abstract: This dissertation examines a practice of scientific museums in the 19th and early 20th centuries: the exchange of their duplicate specimens. Specimen exchange facilitated the rise of universal museums while creating a transnational network through which objects, knowledge, and museum practitioners circulated. My primary focus concerns the exchange of anthropological duplicate specimens at the Smithsonian Institution from 1880 to 1920. Specimen exchange was implemented as a strategic measure to quell the growth of scientific collections curated by the Smithsonian prior garnering to the broad political support needed to fund a national museum. My analysis examines how its practice was connected to both anthropological knowledge production, particularly in terms of diversifying the scope of museum collections, and knowledge dissemination. The latter includes an examination of how anthropological duplicates were used to illustrate competing explanations of culture change and generate interest in anthropological subject matter for non-specialist audiences. I examine the influence of natural history classification systems on museum-based anthropology by analyzing how the notion of duplicate was applied to collections of material culture. As the movement of museum objects are of particular concern to anthropologists involved in repatriation practices, I use specimen exchange to demonstrate that while keeping objects is a definitive function of the museum, an understanding of why and how museum objects have been kept or not kept in the past, particularly in terms of the intentions and value systems of curators, is critical in developing an ethically oriented dialogue about disposition of museum objects in the future. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Anthropology 2014

Thesis: Sc. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautical Engineering, 1916. / MIT Institue Archives Thesis Coll.: copy is the Smithsoniam Institution publication. / Publication 2414. Hodgkins fund. Originaly prepared by Hunsaker as his Eng. D. Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautical Engineering, 1916. According to the MIT Registrar's Office, this degree was changed to an Sc.D., 1923 June 12. Original thesis did not contain the three plates. / by Jerome C. Hunsaker ... assisted by T. H. Huff, S. B., D. W. Douglas, S. B., H. K. Chow, S. M., and V. E. Clark. / Sc. D.

The events of 9-11 resulted in a slew of policy, procedural, and organizational changes within many government departments as the U.S. government took many steps to enhance security to prevent future terrorist attacks. The emphasis on high threat targets by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other government agencies, such as the White House, the Capitol and Congressional office buildings, major infrastructure and facilities within US cities, airline travel, ports and economic supply chains has generated a great deal of debate and attention. There are however, targets that are considered low risk situated in high threat areas that also provide open access to the public for which security professionals are responsible that should not be overlooked during the War on Terror. The question is how low risk targets in high threat areas should be protected? What resource distribution makes sense? What practices should be applied to achieve security? The purpose of this research is to look at one of these targets, the Smithsonian Institution and how the Smithsonian Institution's Office of Protection Services (SI OPS) responded to the terror attacks of 9-11 and the ongoing threat. Four factors will be examined: (1) the screening process, (2) the budget, (3) the security policy formulation process, and (4) training. The study focus is based on data derived from semi-structured interviews and a review of SI documents. Examining post 9-11 security changes allows one to see how SI OPS has evolved in its attempt to meet both internal security demands and expectations against an external security concern. The findings reveal SI OPS initially underwent significant changes within the four factors in the three years following the attacks of 9-11. However, limited resources and manpower strains have played major roles in the subsequent decline in some of the factors after their initial increases. Although a return to the security levels immediately following 9-11 may not be imminent, it is recommended that OPS management make stronger efforts to communicate with non-security managers and return to more stringent visitor screening procedures. / Ph. D.