Research Guides: [FAS] GEN ED 1097: Tradition, Performance, and Culture : Material Lore

Searching HOLLIS

Use the Advanced Search feature with the "Library Catalog" option in HOLLIS to try some of the following subject headings related to material lore:

Clothing and Dress
Costume
Food
Material Culture
Toys
Traditional Medicine

Click on the following example to view a search and its results (once you click on the link, feel free to modify the search to your liking by adding key terms and/or refining the search using the facets provided on the right-hand side of the screen):

Subject contains costume OR "clothing and dress" AND Keywords anywhere contains folk* OR social
[SCOPE: Library Catalog; Language: English]

Specialized Reference Materials

Ames, K., & Schlereth, T. (1985). Material culture: A Research Guide. University Press of Kansas.
Contains essays by scholars who know the scope and significance of material culture within the disciplines of cultural geography, vernacular architecture, the history of technology, the decorative arts, and folklife studies. This collection emphasizes some of the subfields of research on material culture.
Oxford Art Online
Oxford Art Online brings together Grove Art Online, Oxford Companion to Western Art, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, and the Benezit Dictionary of Artists. With nearly 149,000 entries, Benezit is distinguished by its coverage of both lesser-known and famed artists, images of artists’ signatures, historical auction records, and lists of museum holdings.
Schlereth, T. (1982). Material Culture Studies in America. American Association for State and Local History.
Provides the beginning student with a brief overview of the history, theory , and practice of material culture studies.
Thursby, J. (2008). Foodways and Folklore: A Handbook (Greenwood folklore handbooks). Greenwood Press.
A comprehensive introduction to the folklore of food from the early Native American cultures to the multicultural cuisine of the present day.

Finding Primary Sources

Artstor Collections on JSTOR
Artstor is an image collection with content from museums, photo archives, scholars, and artists, including Harvard collections. It is a database of curated collections of art images and associated data covering many time periods and cultures, and documenting the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design, as well as many other forms of visual culture.
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Use this to find high quality images and (just as important) the kind of reliable metadata (information about the images) that are lacking in a wild Google Image search.
Bridgeman Art Library
Bridgeman Art Library offers keyword searching and display of its collection of over 350,000 art images from more than 8,000 major international museums, galleries, auction houses, and other collections.
Harvard Digital Collections
Harvard University Library Digital Collections showcases selected digital image collections created from unique Harvard Library holdings across a broad range of disciplines and cultural history worldwide.
HOLLIS Images
HOLLIS Images is the Harvard Library's dedicated image catalog. It includes content from archives, museums, libraries, and other collections throughout Harvard University. To date, only a portion of Harvard’s visual resources are described herein.
Index to 19th-century American art periodicals. Research Libraries Group.
Indexes several art journals published in the US, with descriptions of illlustrations and advertisements, in addition to article text. Many records contain abstracts.
Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC)
An indispensable research instrument for anyone interested in classical mythology. The catalogue of plastic-art representations of myths is exhaustive. In French, German, Italian, and English. Use with the LIMC indices. See also LIMC website.

Berg Fashion Library
Provides integrated text and image content on world dress and fashion throughout history. Offers fully cross-searchable access to an expanding range of Berg content collections, including the Encyclopedia of world dress and fashion, e-books, e-journals, museum directory, reference works, images, and more. Browsable by time (1600 to date) and by place (click on world map).

Food and Drink in History
"From feast to famine, explore five centuries of primary source material documenting the story of food and drink throughout history. The materials in this collection illustrate the deep links between food and identity, politics and power, gender, race and socio-economic status, as well as charting key issues around agriculture, nutrition and food production. Explore a wide range of primary source material, including printed and manuscript cookbooks, advertising ephemera, government reports, films, and illustrated content revealing the evolution of food and drink within everyday life and the public sphere. The unique material in this collection has been sourced from across the globe to reflect a wide range of food cultures and traditions, creating an unparalleled resource for research. Material has been sourced from institutions across the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia with a focus on gaining as global a view on food history as possible. The earliest documents are from the sixteenth century and the latest from the early twenty-first century."
Food Studies Online
Collection of archival content, visual ephemera, monographs, and videos that explore how food shapes the world around us. Key themes and disciplines with extensive coverage represented include: marketing and consumerism, production and technology, food history, food movements, culinary and food design, food and identity, health, policy, religion, sociology, anthropology, and history. Collection highlights include: National Archives records on school lunch programs and WWII Food Campaign Files; full text of the Cheese Reporter trade magazine; historic diet books; and a Food Ephemera Collection of educational pamphlets from food production companies, food labels, advertisements, and recipe books
History of Food and Dining at Harvard
Here you’ll find almost everything you ever wanted to know about the history of food and dining at the University. From the Early records of the Steward, 1649-1812 to Harvard's Web Archive Collection Service, the University Archives collections serve up an extensive and diverse collection of material related to eating, drinking, and being merry across centuries and dining rooms.