Home: A 20<super>th</super> century American construction.

Abstract

Whether image, word, or structure, a place that includes people, serves as a place of growth, learning, and adaptation, operates as a private, intimate space and a safe haven, and acts as a fixed point or ordering principle is considered a <italic>home.</italic> Using the methodologies of visual and material culture studies, I argue that twentieth century Americans used objects, photographs, and stories to conform to an American ideal of <italic> home</italic> that includes a sense of history, belonging, security, and identity. My inquiries begin with houses as they exist physically, and continue with houses as they exist photographically and mythically. Architecture (theory and history); photography (theory, history, photograph albums), place (geography, landscape, region, nation, the local, environmental psychology), homemaking (gender studies, sentimentality, home economics, and the cult of domesticity), and historic preservation (house histories, local history, and history museums) inform studies of that movement between and coexistence of material, visual, and narrative. In the first chapter, I discuss the philosophies of <italic>home</italic> developed during the twentieth century and my reasons for studying this American construction. The succeeding chapters focus on: houses as objects of study; photographs as objects of study and as pieces of narrative; a house in Colchester, Vermont; Charles Sheeler's Doylestown House photographs; the Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village; and photograph albums as extensions of domestic space. Much of my theorization of <italic>home</italic> belongs involves questions of sentimentality. Thus I have chosen to embrace the emotional underpinnings of <italic>home</italic> by illustrating the process of homemaking with examples from my own life, narratives and photographs. Because they come from the period in question and allow me to actually demonstrate the homemaking process at work for Americans in the twentieth century, these examples and emotions are pivotal to my work. With them, I illustrate and begin to define a much larger American ideal of <italic>home</italic> as a place to live, feel free, and locate memories; a place to learn, to create intimacy, to feel safe, to return; a place created in order to feel belonging.