Update: Summer 2015

Hello, everyone! After a long hiatus (thanks, grad school), I am back and planning to add lots of new discoveries to this blog. Most of them will be centered around my Master's thesis, currently in the works. In case you're interested, this is the abstract of my thesis proposal, titled "Excavating Personhood in the 19th-century Graveyard":

The St. George’s/St. Mark’s Cemetery in Mount Kisco, New York, offers an ideal site in which to investigate the construction of 19th-century middle-class personhood through intersectional processes. Previous studies have generally conceptualized the gravestone either as a passive reflection of social realities or as a site of the momentary suspension of social difference. The proposed study will marshal historical and archaeological evidence in demonstrating how gravestones functioned as active participants in the articulation of class- and gender-based identities and accordingly, in the negotiation of power. The gravestone represents a crucial player in the performance of middle-class habitus as it was staged throughout the 19th century. Though tied to larger historical movements, the construction of the American middle class took place within the realm of everyday material practice, in which the gravestone constituted an instrument for the enactment of embodied dispositions. By revealing the contingencies surrounding the formation of middle-class personhood, this study will denaturalize the categories that organize both historical and present-day social realities.

I am excited to share the results of my research so far, which has been undertaken mainly at the Westchester County Archives in Elmsford and the Mount Kisco Historical Society. I may also end up visiting the New York Public Library, the Municipal Archives in Manhattan, and even the State Archives at Albany.

My research mainly involves people and things: who those people were, and how they created, expressed, and maintained those identities through things. More specifically, how did various realms of material culture collude in the creation of a middle-class identity, and how was that identity asserted against its "Other," the marginalized classes of the poor?

Perhaps the most illustrative example of this process I can give is that of the St. George's/St. Mark's Cemetery, an 18th- and 19th-century middle-class graveyard that has been immaculately preserved throughout the years, in juxtaposition with the 19th- and 20th-century graveyard of the Westchester County Almshouse, which is currently sealed beneath a highway. The historical boundary between the middle class and the poor continues to be enforced into the present, so that the poor become as marginalized in death as they were in life.

Over the next few months (before I head back to school), I hope to use this blog as a place to share my research and test out some ideas before they become processed and packaged into the body of my thesis. For now, here's a first glimpse of the Westchester County Almshouse as it appeared around the turn of the century, courtesy of Harvard University Library.