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In this episode, Elise Milburn (Ph.D. Student, Pennsylvania State University) interviews Ashli White (Professor of History and Chair of History Department, University of Miami) about her new book Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century, published through Yale University Press in 2023.
Historian Ashli White explores the circulation of material culture during the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, arguing that in the late eighteenth century, radical ideals were contested through objects as well as in texts. She considers how revolutionary things, as they moved throughout the Atlantic, brought people into contact with these transformative political movements in visceral, multiple, and provocative ways.
Focusing on a range of objects—ceramics and furniture, garments and accessories, prints, maps, and public amusements—White shows how material culture held political meaning for diverse populations. Enslaved and free, women and men, poor and elite—all turned to things as a means to realize their varied and sometimes competing visions of revolutionary change.
Join us as we explore a new way to understand revolutionary processes and participation through material culture in the 18th century Atlantic world.
Elise Nicole Milburn hosts for the Revolutionary America channel of the New Books Network.