Things that Speak

Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence

that throughout the centuries something really happened
among human beings.
Claude Lvi-Strauss

Every day we are surrounded by, exchange, and

engage with objects. Yet usually we do not regard
material things as sources of intellectual inquiry.
Even though commonplace objects are often
intensely charged with meaning. They are places
in which deep intimacies are achieved. Where we
define who we are and want to become. Or where
we can trace mute resistance. Based on research
by undergraduate students from the English
capstone American Everyday taught in the 2014
fall semester, this exhibition examines nineteenthcentury objects cherished and saved by Kansans,
often over generations, and the stories they
have passed along with them. Things that Speak
approaches these objects as windows onto dazzling
and usually unexplored local experiences, that
link the present to the past and Kansas to larger
American stories and to the world. The thirteen
case studies are also an attempt to give a voice to
people who had no access to print culture but whose
lives and opinions are extraordinary and matter.
Listening to Things that Speak, once objects of
fascination, association, and endless consideration,
is an invitation to rethink how almost any material
object mediates social relationships, creates and
embodies meaning, having a form and agency of its
own.

02

Table of Contents
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Reading Glasses
A Banyan
An Enlisted Slave
A Hair Wreath
A Quaker Dress
A Paisley Shawl
A Cummerbund
A Navajo Dress
A Native Ledger
A Womans Magazine
A Family Bible
An Empire Dress
A Quilt
Thank You

Special Thanks to Tommy Theis

from KSU Photographic Services
for his images of the items.

03

Perfect Sight: A Clear Vision

for Female Erudition

Pince-Nez is a French term for this style of nineteenthcentury glasses, a name that translates in English to
pinch nosed. Dr. Albert Fremont Barfoot, whose colorful
banyan is also on display in this exhibition, had worked
his way up from a humble farming background to a
medical degree and career. This popular and inexpensive
form of eyewear was worn by two-thirds of the American
population needing glasses. Theodore Roosevelt, for
example, was notorious for sporting them during his
presidency. The glasses4 inches wide with a half-inch
nosepiecewere designed for the wearers convenience.
To this end, the right lens has a hole drilled on the outer
edge to allow a chain to pass through. This chain, also
called langelier, would fasten to the wearers shirt so that
the eyeglasses could be easily removed without damage or
loss. The black leather glasses case carries the name of the
owner embossed in gold, sporting a purple velvet interior.
Eyeglasses were and are still a symbol of intelligence,
learning, and the visual exploration of the world. The
magnifying power of glasses comes from pinpointing
a specific area of focus. Dorothy Barfoot, the daughter
of Albert and donor of this object, saved her fathers
glasses as a symbol of her own focus. As Head of the Art
Department at Kansas State University between 1945
and 1966, Dorothy was an active role model in the upand-coming movement for female higher education and
the place of women in universities. Dorothy Barfoot
cared for her fathers spectacles because they reminded
her of her commitment to the world of learning. Yet,
they were also a symbol for more than her fathers life;
and her convictions never wavered. Dorothy remained
focused. A strong-willed woman in a male academic
world, she became an artist, a passionate art professor
and a committed department head. At her death in 1984,
Dorothy Barfoots life spanned two World Wars, the
Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, and the
development of equality for women in the United States.

04

Abby Kopp

Pince-Nez Eyeglasses; ca 1890

Gift of Dorothy Barfoot
Kansas State University Historic
Costume and Textile Museum

Cosmopolitanism and Upward

Mobility in the Midwest
This banyan belonged to Albert Barfoot, an Iowan
physician. The banyan, an upper class mens leisure
robe, denoted wealth and status among educated
and wealthy men due to its expensive materials
and exotic Persian and Asian influences. The word
banyan is derived from the Sanskrit term for a Hindu
trader or merchant, as it was traders that eventually
brought the oriental garment to Europe. The fabric
on the exterior of this robe is wool challis, while the
interior is a similarly patterned cotton calico. The
collar and pocket flap are made from cotton twill,
and the dyes used to color the fabric would have been
produced in India, such as indigo and cochineal.

Banyan; c. 1900
Gift of Dorothy Barfoot
Kansas State University Historic
Costume and Textile Museum

The banyan would have been worn at home during

leisure activities, which speaks to this article of clothing
as a symbol of class and cosmopolitan style, as only
the wealthy elite enjoyed and celebrated in this specific
outfit leisure time. The robe was especially popular
among intellectual men, including Albert Barfoot,
because of its resemblance to academic robes. Thus,
the banyan became a symbol of not only financial
status and colonial trading relations but of intelligence
and ingenuity as well, as many famous thinkers like
Sir Isaac Newton and Jean-Jacques Rousseau posed
for portraits wearing banyans. For Albert Barfoot, a
man who heralded from a Midwestern farming family,
ownership of a banyan conveyed and was meant to
articulate an impressive step up in the social ladder.

Kylie McKenzie

07

The Cost of a Free Man

A Claim for Compensation for Enlisted Slave is an
application of former slaveholders in Border States
(Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Tennessee,
and West Virginia) that remained loyal to the Union
could file after the war in order to receive financial
payment for slaves who had enlisted in the Union Army.
In Missouri, such claim applications were first allowed
due to General John Schoefields General Order 135,
according to which any able bodied black man could
enlist in the Union army, regardless of whether his
master was loyal or disloyal to the Union cause. After
the war, however, two federal acts, Section 24 Act 13 of
the February 24th 1864 Enrollment Act and Section 2
of the July 28th, 1866 Act, gave former slaveholders in
Border States the option to apply for financial restitution
in case they had lost a slave to the promise of freedom
by enlistment. With that, the American government
recognized a claim of property in a veteran of the Civil War.
Horace Kingsburys Claim for Compensation for Enlisted
Slave speaks to the concept of African Americans as
less than human, regardless of their right to freedom.
Examining this claim raises the question: what does it
mean to pay for a free man? Many former slaveholders
continued to place a monetary value on their ex slaves
instead of viewing them as free and equal members of a
new society they allegedly wanted to build. Such fraught
racial dynamics and double standards are especially
relevant if we think about current events in Ferguson,
Missouri, and New York City. Kingsburys request for
compensation was rejected. The reason was because his
former slave Albert Cavanaugh was rejected from service
four days after his volunteering. While race relations
have evolved between Kingsburys claim and the
present, the source of strained white-black relationships
seems to come down to the value of a black man.

08

Kayla Mabon

Claim for Compensation for Enlisted Slave; 1866

National Archives, Kansas City, Missouri

Eternal Bonds: Of Hair and Family

This intricate hair wreath was probably handmade by the
Zahnley family living on 1850 Claflin Road in Manhattan,
Kansas. Throughout the nineteenth century, women
journals published instructions on how to create objects
and jewelry from human hair as artifacts of affection and
treasured mementos. Due to its capacity to retain color,
substance and elasticity even after being separated from the
living body, hair was understood as a symbol of enduring
life. Refashioned, as in this wreath, into eternal familial
flowers of blooms, sentimental hair objects were part of a
larger nineteenth-century culture of mourning, of which
the cummerbund in this exhibition is another example. In
this hair wreath the wish to keep the bodies of loved ones
from dying and decaying is expressed on an aesthetic level.
Instead of dismissing hair objects as disturbing relics from
the past, we need to remember that for nineteenth-century
Americans objects made of hair had the power to visualize
invisible sentimental bonds and to reconstruct the human
body into an ideal form that could overcome death.
The 10.5 inches by 11 inches hair wreath of the Zahnley
family is made of hair from several generations and
various donors, as the different hair colors shading from
light blond, dark blond, strawberry blond and brunette
make visible. Small paper labels record some of the family
members names, who donated their hair, such as Hattie,
William, James, Frankland, Mabelle and Becky Zahnley.
Hair kept from grandparents was used as well. Notice the
tags labeled grandpa and grandma. So was hair from
close family friends, like Mary, who was Mary MacAdoos,
the Zahnleys neighbor. Creating the over 25 individual hair
blooms, leaves, and ornaments would have taken Hazel, or
Hattie Zahnley, who probably made the wreath, a couple
of months. An amber colored, wooden and glass box keeps
the hair wreath safe: a proud symbol that still speaks of
the eternal, affective bonds that united this Kansas family.
Davis Mattek

10

Hair Wreath; ca 1920

Gift of Donald Zahnley
Riley County Historical Society, Manhattan

Women Fight Oppression

with Clothing
The term Quaker refers to The Religious Society of Friends,
a radical Protestant denomination founded in England by
George Fox in 1650. Members were popularly and derogatively called Quakers due to the shaking movement they
made during religious services. This Kansas Quaker dress
is of a rich plum color, created by the natural dye cochineal.
Cochineal is an Aztec red dye of pre-Hispanic Mexico that
became a major trade good. It is obtained from a dried scale
insect that manufactures a deep maroon pigment. Notice,
there are various stains on the plum dress, likely caused
by acid spills of fruit drinks or bodily fluids, such as sweat.
The material of this completely hand-sewn dress is silk
which was likely imported from Asia. Both color and fabric
were expensive and point to the festive purpose of the outfit. The dress has an empire waistline and a simple A-line
skirt. The gigot sleeves hold 30 pleats and have an expanded bulging shape in the elbows, which tapers at the wrist.

Quaker Dress; ca. 1820

Gift of Mrs. J.T. Hickman
Kansas State University Historic
Costume and Textile Museum

The Quaker dress is fascinating because of its contradictions.

While some elements of the dress articulate Quaker plain
style such as the simple A-line skirt, other elements point
to a subtle rebellion on the part of the wearer. The curved
tailored sleeves of the dress, for example, are enormously
restrictive. They force the wearer to hold her arms in a decorative bent position. Yet, we can also find moments of rebellion against both plain style and female roles expectations
in the dress, such as the lace flower decoration on the waist
and purely ornamental pleats on the arms. Rebellious and
articulate women often had Quaker associations because
Quakers promoted the most progressive gender politics in
the Christian tradition. This explains why many Quaker
women, such as Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott, led
the nineteenth-century womens suffrage movement. Our
dress may never have been that radical though it still was an
articulate, textile statement of the wearers complex beliefs.
Kate Haddock

13

Weft and Warp of

Westward Expansion

The design we call paisley comes from the ancient Persian

motif and term boteh, meaning bush, shrub, or thicket.
Originally, Paisley was a male pattern in the Middle East,
the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Its floral design and arabesque, vine-like ornaments were read as symbols of fertility and the tree of life. Only in the eighteenth century, when
the East India Trading Company opened travel to the Himalayas began, did Paisley journey to Europe. The design
gained popularity in womens fashion in the early nineteenth century, when the town of Paisley in Scotland became the epicenter for the production of shawls. Traditionally, the shawls were woven of finely spun and very soft wool
from the underbellies of Tibetan goats, known as cashmere.

Paisley Shawl; 1863

Gift of Ruth Bascom in the name of
Doris Hays Fenton
Kansas State University Historic
Costume and Textile Museum

Our shawl is made of four distinct colors: red, light pink,

cream and green. Red is the basic warp color, the use of
light pink, cream and green weft threads create most of the
paisley pattern, forming teardrop shaped botehs, blooming flowers, and vines. 79.5 inches long, 58 inches wide,
and only around 10 ounces in weight, this shawl still holds
28 paisley patterns even if its fabric has become tenuous
and is missing in parts. This was an expansive and very elegant paisley shawl due to its delicate weave. Typical for
shawls popular between 1840 and 1875, a light colored
center, which often came also in scarlet red or black in
case of mourning shawls, is clearly noticeable. We know
that this paisley shawl was preserved by the Manhattan
born Ruth Bascom whose parents Doris and Frederick
Fenton were professors at Kansas State University due to
a family anecdote. Her great grandparents, Isaac and Maria Beach from upstate New York purchased the shawl in
1863 in order to wrap Ruths Bascoms grandmother, Ellen, as a baby and protect her during the winter. The shawl
journeyed with the Beach children and their offspring
from New York to Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and then
to Kansas and thus records not only a family history but
also a larger American narrative of westward expansion.
Rachel Regier

15

Widows Weeds: A Cultures

Fascination With Mourning

The term cummerbund comes from the Urdu and Persian

karmar-band for loin-band. That is, a cummerbund
is a sash or girdle worn around the waist. This specific
cummerbund is part of a bodice and skirt that form
a complete nineteenth-century mourning outfit. The
cummerbund is 28 inches wide and 6 inches high.
Materially, it is made of two different overlapping fabrics.
For the center diamond shape a black mourning crepe, or
silk crepe was used. Also within the diamond, there are
three vertical lines or ruched folds. The bands surrounding
the center diamond as well as the knotted work that outlines
the diamond shape are made of silk taffeta. Framing the
edges of the taffeta are thirty-two French knots, sixteen on
each side of the center. The elegant French knotted stitch
is an embroidery technique where the thread is gently
wrapped around the needle creating a textured, knotlike ball on the surface of the fabric. Four evenly spaced
hook and eye claps provide a closure for the garment.
This cummerbund is representative of the nineteenth
centurys obsession with mourning. During the period,
death was ubiquitous, something that visited Americans
early and often, an almost constant companion. Mourning
outfits allow us to access this culture of mourning. They
were called widows weeds because black garments
started taking on a rusty color with age. Unlike today,
death was a public topic and families obsessed and
embraced popular grieving rituals. In fact, families would
sink into debt in order to honor the death of a loved one.
Usually, mourners transitioned through multiple stages
of commemoration: first or deep mourning, second
mourning, ordinary mourning, and light mourning. While
these phases of mourning could vary, typically each of these
stages would last six months. By the end of the nineteenth
century, this fascination with mourning disappeared
from popular culture and is now considered morbid.
Kari Bingham-Gutierrez

16

Cummerbund; ca. 1890

Gift of Cornelia Davis on behalf of her
parents Orville and Gertrude Burtis
Kansas State University Historic
Costume and Textile Museum

A Navajo Dress For the White Man

Navajo women constructed this dress by fashioning
together two rectangular woven panels, leaving openings
for the head and arms of the wearer. The warp material
of this dress is a wool yarn, in a dark green or dull green
color. Additionally, there are four different weft materials:
hand spun blue (indigo dye) wool, hand spun black
(native dye) wool, commercial blue (indigo dye) yarn,
and bayeta-style red (cochineal dye) wool. Bayeta is a
traditional Navajo weaving style, where the artist utilizes
yarn undone and recycled from a former garment. This
particular red and black fabric design was popular among
white Americans who bought indigenous objects, such
as native baskets, blankets, and bowls for their domestic
Indian collections; in fact we can find eerily similar dresses
in a number of museum holdings and books on Navajo art.

Navajo Dress
ca. 1860
Kansas State University Historic Costume
and Textile Museum

The dress could have been constructed in a workshop of

a Native American boarding school, in which indigenous
children were educated according to white EuroAmerican standards. The dress is representative of the
commercialized interest in Navajo objects during the
nineteenth century. In workshops of boarding schools,
Native American girls had to create indigenous-style
products, not for their cultural or spiritual use but for
so-called Indian Corners of white American collectors.
Indian Corners were areas in non-native households that
displayed indigenous artifacts following a widespread,
nineteenth-century craze for indigenous handicrafts. This
interest in native art in the wake of American modernism,
according to the historian Elizabeth Hutchinson,
convinced policymakers that art was an important
aspect of traditional native culture worth preserving.
Brent Weaver

19

Northern Cheyenne Plea for

Innocence and Equality

In 1879, a group of seven Northern Cheyenne menWild

Hog, Porcupine, Old Crow, Strong Left Hand, Noisy Walker
(or Old Man), Tangle Hair, and Blacksmithimprisoned
in Dodge City, Kansas, filled this ledger with drawings of
animals, warriors, and Cheyenne men courting Cheyenne
women. Images like the ones shown in our open page are
common throughout the ledger. On the first page we see
a mother bear standing over her cub. Many pages of the
ledger focus on different animals with their young. The
second page, for example, shows five Cheyenne women
in courting blankets. We find a number of such courting
scenes in the Cheyenne ledger. Throughout the 3.25 inches
by 5 inches notebook, which is about the size of a notecard,
the Cheyenne artists used pencil, crayon, and watercolor
to create their colorful images of Cheyenne life and culture
in primary colors and simplicity of line. Typically, each
left page offers a drawing in the direction of the reading
process while the drawing on the right page is up side down.
This page organization follows characteristics narrative
structures of traditional Plains hide painting practiced
before the indigenous tribes of the Midwest were forced
on reservations in the 1870s. The Northern Cheyenne were
among the tribes that resisted removal to reservations for the
longest. After a failed attempt to avoid American forces, the
army arrested the seven Northern Cheyenne, imprisoned
them in Dodge City, and charged them with 40 counts of
murder. Traditionally, Cheyenne drawings were created
by warrior artists to regale combative events recorded
in pictures not words. However, the seven imprisoned
Cheyenne men consciously focused on peaceful cultural
scenes, personal experiences, including a female point of
view. They later traded, sold, and gifted ledgers like this to
visitors, such as Sallie Straughn, whose husband served as
a prison warden in Dodge City. Sallie probably circulated
the ledger among white townspeople, which made a
powerful claim for Cheyenne art and culture. The Northern
Cheyenne men were eventually acquitted for the murders
and sent to the reservation to join the survivors of their tribe.
Joshua Porteous

20

Northern Cheyenne Ledger; 1879

Gift of Sallie Straughn
Kansas Historical Society, Topeka

Women Magazines and the

Construction of Gender
The Ladys Monthly Museum; Or, Polite Repository of
Amusement and Instruction was an English monthly
magazine published between 1798 and 1832. A leading
womens periodical, its readers lived through the opening
of the New York Stock Exchange, the French Revolution,
the Louisiana Purchase, the abolition of the slave trade
in Britain, and Napoleons rise to and fall from power.
Typically, the Ladys Monthly Museum featured segments
of serialized novels and dramas published in full over the
course of multiple issues, it also had an agony aunt page.
In addition, it was one of the first womens periodical
to feature colored engravingsthe open pages show
good examples of such full color insertsillustrating
fashionable outfits. Targeting upper class and educated
women, the magazine published as well short stories and
poems by female authors, profiled important women
of the day, and explored topics such as the origin of the
English Bluestocking Society, an informal womens social
and educational movement, led by Elizabeth Montagu and
Elizabeth Vesey. Women magazines were an important
female public space that reflected and reinforced culturally
constructed definitions of womanhood, femininity, and
female sexuality throughout the nineteenth century.
This second volume of the Ladys Monthly Magazine has
a fascinating gendered provenance history. While we know
nothing about its first owner, two female book collectors
who were both involved in womens education and costume
history possessed the book later: Roberta Klendshoj and
Dorothy Stout. Roberta Klendshoj inserted a bookplate
into the volume that establishes her ownership and implies
a larger collection of historic womens magazines. Dorothy
Stout, the donor of the volume, took a History of Costume
class with Gertrude Lienkaemper at Kansas State University
and was so captivated by the topic that she became a tenured
faculty in the discipline at Stephens College in Columbia, MO.

22

Elijah Kampsen

The Ladys Monthly Museum, Volume 2; 1799

Gift of Dorothy Stout
Kansas State University Historic
Costume and Textile Museum

In Memoranda:
For Lydia and Literacy
Printed in 1885 by the Kansas City Publishing Company,
the Cunningham Family Bible was one of the first American
Bibles printed with the new English Revised Version
in parallel to the King James Version. The King James
Version, completed in 1611, was one of the first authorized
translations of the Bible into English. In the nineteenth
century Americans were so attracted to a contemporary
edition of the over 200 year old King James Bible that over
three million copies of the ERV were sold in the first months
of its release in 1885. However, after the initial excitement
wore off, Americans returned to their trusty King James
Version. Inside the Cunningham Bible, pages are provided
for genealogical records. A family bible this size wouldve
cost $15 in 1885 which would be around $383 today.

Cunningham Family Bible, 1885

Gift of Dana Cunningham
Private Collection of Owner

In 1886, Thomas Cunningham presented this Bible to his

wife, Margaret. Born in Tennessee in 1833, Thomas was
a farmer like his father. Census records report Thomas as
illiterate and neglect Margarets literacy, but it is likely she
also had a limited reading proficiency. Despite the inability
to read the Bible himself, Thomas bought the 12.8 lb volume
articulating a desire for knowledge and print culture. The
Bibles family birth, death, and marriage pages provided
Thomas and Margaret an avenue to create a record of their
family. Here, for example, we find Lydia, their second child
although no official record notes the one month life of
the baby, only the Cunningham Bible. This record makes
the Bible not only a symbol for Thomass faith and social
aspirations for their children, but also articulates a longing
for his transient life to be remembered within book culture.
Rachel Cunningham

25

Purposefully Crafted Simplicity

Crafted in the French Neoclassical style, this apparently
simple white gown is completely hand-sewn. Its fabric
is extremely delicate, white muslin, a fabric made of
spun cotton with a plain weave and varying in weight,
style and dye according to taste. The gown features
526 triangles of prairie point edging around the hems.
According to modern sizing, this gown would be a size
ten childs form featuring a waistline of only 28.5 inches.
The hemline of the gown showcases so-called whitework
French embroidery. This barely discernable, exquisitely
crafted, and labor intensive pattern in white on white was
created to add understated elegance to the dress while
maintaining its humble appearance. Popular in the early
1800s, this style of dress copied ancient Greek and Roman
raised waistline gowns. The term Empire dress refers to
the period of the First French Empire when Napoleons
wife Josephine popularized the style around Europe.

Muslin Empire Dress; ca. 1810

Gift of Arthur Frederick Peine
Kansas State University Historic
Costume and Textile Museum

The German Anna Peine wore this dress as a young girl

in the early nineteenth century, which marks her cultural
status and wealth. Donated by Annas grandson, Arthur
Frederick Peine, the gown travelled with the Paine family
from Germany to Minier, Illinois, to which they first
immigrated in 1846, and then to Manhattan, Kansas. The
Peine family has had a strong impact on the Kansas State
community. Arthur Frederick and his daughter Caroline
both were professors at the university. Along with the dress,
the Peine family donated a colorful shawl and a dark red
petticoat, both of which are from different styles and time
periods. This collection of family heirlooms indicates the
familys dedication to documenting their history through
a history of fashions and fabrics and by doing so, also the
history of Kansas. Through the preservation of this dress,
we better understand the kinds of people who settled and
built the everyday American Midwest. But the dress also
speaks to the awareness, that who the Peines were as a
family was in part expressed and fashioned by their clothing.
Brittany Roberts

27

Stitched Suffrage:
A Quilt that Voices a Womans Vote
This Whigs Defeat quilt pattern was a stitched response
to the United States presidential election in 1844 of the
Democrat James Polk over Henry Clay from the Whig
Party, in which women did not have a vote. The Whig
Party formed in 1834 as an opposition to the Democrats.
The Whigs favored modernization and supported the
supremacy of Congress over the President. As a woman, the
Kansas quilter Martha Paulk lacked the right to vote in the
election. Yet, her stitched quilt pattern speaks her vote
in favor of the Democrat Polk. In America, women did not
gain the right to vote for almost another century. Finally on
the 18th of August 1920, the US Congress ratified the 19th
Amendment, which prohibits any United States citizen
from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex.
Martha Jane Porter Paulks hand-sewn, symbolic quilt
pattern features ten complete red and green diamond
shapes, nine half diamonds, two quarter diamonds, and
a winding, floral border along three sides of the quilt
cover. Notice how these patterns in color kept in place
by around 69,000 stitches are complicated by almost
invisible, elaborate patterns in white on the white cotton
background. The colored calico fabrics used here are
either plain, dotted, or floral prints. These calicos may
have been leftovers from the humble homemade dresses
Martha sewed for her daughters. They offer a textile
testimony of her familys dire life conditions as Kansas
farmers. What is more, Martha took her opinionated
quilt to a county fair in the late nineteenth century and
won first prize. This public display of her craftsmanship
articulates a strong desire to have both her artistic skills
and her political opinions valued and made public.
Laura Sommers

28

Whigs Defeat Quilt; c. 1850-1860

Gift of James Grauerholz
Kansas State University Historic Costume
and Textile Museum

Thank You

Only a collaborative effort of a number of people
and institutions made the thirteen objects of this
exhibition into Things that Speak.

First and foremost, I would like to thank Marla
Day, curator of the Kansas State University Historic
Costume and Textile Museum. With enthusiasm and
unwavering dedication to her collection, she granted
access to a fascinating archive of everyday objects and
helped my students and me find informed and exciting
ways to give these objects a voice. Without Marlas
expertise this project would never have been possible.

In an age obsessed with the virtual, my
studentsKari Bingham-Gutierrez, Rachel
Cunningham, Kate Haddock, Elijah Kampsen, Abby
Kopp, Kayla Mabon, Kylie McKenzie, Davis Mattek,
Joshua Porteous, Rachel Regier, Brittany Roberts,
Laura Sommers, and Brent Weavermade a generous
leap of faith and jumped knee-deep into the unfamiliar
terrain of material culture studies and real, ordinary
things. Thank you for lending your articulate voices to
these objects.

It is a pleasure, too, to acknowledge the Kansas
State University College of Arts and Sciences that
funded the Undergraduate Research Scholarship for
Brittany Roberts and Rachel Cunningham. Under the
guidance of the wonderful Alex Stinson, our Digital
Humanities Specialist, Brittany and Rachel built and
furnished the online exhibition, Things that Speak, to
give the researched objects a voice beyond their local
display. Alex likewise dreamed up the exhibition QR
code upload option, so we can be multimedia. Big
thanks go also to the Kansas State University Chapman
Center and to Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, who offered to
house the companion digital exhibition Things that
Speak.

30

Beth Bailey, Program Manager of the Union Program
Council, and her students, the UPC Arts co-chairs Abigail
Krstulic and Philomena Sulzen, gave Things that Speak
a home at the William T. Kemper Art Gallery. They also
provided the organizational infrastructure for setting up the
exhibition and poster.

Thanks go out as well to Jason Coleman and David Vail
for an exciting special collections workshop at Hale Library
that offered a clear road map for student research in local
archives.

The Riley County Historical Society loaned us their
magnificent hair wreath and provided rich expertise for
student research, thanks to Cheryl Collins, Corina Hugo, and
Linda Glasgow.

Luke Dempsey, from the Beach Museum, lent and set
up the exhibition touch screen computer.

Tommy Theis, Kansas State University Photo Services,
shot the stunning images of our objects that fill the catalogue
and online exhibition. The close visual attention of his images
models what it means to look attentively at an object.

Laura Thacker meticulously copyedited all texts.
Carolyn Arand from Art Craft Printers produced the
exhibition catalogue. Anthony Jordan, UPC Lead Arts
Installer and Jenna Wicks, UPC Program Advisor, helped
transport and set up Things that Speak.

Final thanks go to two vital supporters: Rachel
Cunningham who designed the poster and catalogue, went
above and beyond, and made us look so good, and Karin
Westman, Head of the English Department, whose steadfast
advocacy backed, motivated, and funded the exhibition
project and its digital sibling Things that Speak, which can be
visited online at aeveryday.omeka.net.
Steffi Dippold
Assistant Professor
Kansas State University

About Us
Things that Speak springs from student research for the English Capstone Seminar American Everyday (Fall 2014). The thirteen students
enrolled in the seminar were advanced undergraduate English majors: two juniors and eleven seniors. The class American Everyday met
twice each week for seminar discussion with regular visits to the Kansas State Historic Costume
and Textile Museum and its curator, Marla Day.
Most of the nineteenth-century objects for
Things that Speak come from the Historic Costume and Textile Museum. The remaining objects
are drawn from several locations. One object,
a hair wreath, is on loan from the Riley County
Historical Society; the originals of the Northern
Cheyenne Ledger and the Claim for Compensation, which we show in reproduction, are housed
in the Kansas Historical Society, Topeka, and the
National Archives, Kansas City, respectively. The
Kansas Bible on display is a family heirloom.
For more information about English at
Kansas State, please visit our web site at http://
www.k-state.edu/english/ or contact us at <english@ksu.edu>.
Catalogue Design: Rachel Cunningham