| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Laurie A. Wilkie. Creating Freedom: Material Culture and African American Identity in Oakley Plantation, Louisiana 1840–1950. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2000. Pp. xxv, 294. Cloth $69.95, paper $24.95.

Material culture can be a wonderful source of information for historians when they study the inarticulate. Like practicing Jesse Lemisch's "history from the bottom up," records such as censuses, tax rolls, court cases, and estate inventories and wills can combine with objects to provide a more substantial understanding of groups who did not leave their own records. In certain instances the objects become their own records. Researchers, however, must be proficient in the language of the artifact to read them accurately. Another problem is that no universal language of the artifact really exists; rather, many do, all dependent on the different disciplines that have traditionally dealt with objects—art history, the history of technology, antiquarianism, and archaeology. Historians, who are not usually versed or trained in material culture (or the other disciplines), are reluctant to use objects as documents because they cannot read them as such. . . .

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