Sacred Relics – Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth–Century America

“Barnett’s well-researched and care-fully written book helps readers better under-stand the relic’s role in understanding the past and how that understanding has changed over time. . . . This brief yet stimulating book is a must-read for scholars of historical memory.”– “Journal of American History”

“As deeply researched as it is profoundly argued, Sacred Relics is a window onto the now-historical practice of relic hunting that sought to preserve the past a piece at a time–in advance of the museum and a modern understanding of historic preservation. Sacred Relics offers a new way of seeing the otherwise nondescript shards, chips of wood, and bits of metal pried from memorable things to live forever in the act of personal possession.”–William L. Bird “author of Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes, and Curios from the Smithsonian’s National Museum”

“In Sacred Relics, Teresa Barnett explores the variety of physical ways that Americans have created avenues to the past through history’s remains. Barnett gracefully and clearly guides us through this fascinating look at material culture in America, breaking new ground she goes. This is a very fine book.”–Edward Linenthal “author of Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields”

“Teresa Barnett has deaccessioned a museum history of staged tableau and glass-encased artifacts, offering us instead a rich collection of relics dismissed as anachronistic refuse: shards of Plymouth Rock, George Washington’s coat, Abraham Lincoln’s bloodied collar; George Whitefield’s corpse, Pirate Tom Trouble’s arm, Jane McCrea’s teeth; mourning brooches, snuff boxes, buttons, and cannonballs. She trades museal provenance–the prehistory of objects–for the lived lives of relics, affective synecdoches that connect us to the past. With beautiful detail and theoretical sophistication, Barnett makes history proximate. We become antiquarians, touching remainders and relishing their resonance.”–Susan M. Stabile “author of Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America”

“Teresa Barnett is interested in the survival of public things and personal and what they meant to people. Drawing selectively but constructively upon the evidence, episodes, and theories, Sacred Relics is a very sophisticated and polished piece of work, offering the reader a clear sense of change over time in the realm of reliquaries and their keepers. There is no single work like it in US historiography. It will be must reading in the fields of cultural, intellectual, and social history.”–Michael Kammen “author of Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials”

“Teresa Barnett offers a carefully considered account of the creation of historical relics, objects that still occupy a special–and contested–place in the collections of museums and historic sites throughout the United States.”–Katherine C. Grier “author of Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850-1930”