Recalling the past : memories and antiquarian objects in the former Plymouth Colony, 1692-1824
Date
2012
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The former Plymouth Colony was a place where memory mattered in many forms. Founded in 1620, published accounts as early as 1669 began to record the stories and personae of the colony's early years. Diminished from its early prominence by national and imperial forces when it became part of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay in 1692, the people there looked back in time to narrate their past through things. Theories of historical memory offer new ways of thinking about the symbolic use of objects in the region during the long eighteenth century. Building on the writings of Pierre Nora, Joseph Roach and others, this thesis interrogates the different objects and techniques the people of the former Plymouth Colony used to construct a memorial past. This studyexamines three groups of objects used or made in the former Plymouth Colony in the eighteenth century. The first chapter explores the use of a seventeenth-century chair once owned by colonial governor William Bradford in the 1769 celebration of Forefather's Day in Plymouth. Used as a prop for a public performance, the chair allowed eighteenth-century men to lay claim to the memory of the colony's founding. The second chapter examines the portraits of the Winslow family of Marshfield. Painted across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these portraits represent a domestic practice maintained by many generations of the Winslow family. Acting as a living memorial, these portraits gave visual form to a family tree. The final chapter looks at a group of painted chests made in Taunton between 1729 and 1745, reading them into the landscape surrounding the town. With a rich history of indigenous cultures, these chests evoke a landscape filled with artifacts of pre-colonial indigenous cultures. Made in different media and used in different towns across the former Plymouth Colony, these groups of objects show the different ways that memorial practices inflected the material practices of the region. In public and private, these things allowed the people there to reconstruct the past.