Reform (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Christensen.

Studies of reformers and the sites associated with them provide an opportunity to examine how people in the past sought to better their world and in turn, powerfully connect to contemporary efforts to reform society.  In this paper, I detail the collaborative archaeological projects undertaken at two sites associated with female reformers – Matilda Joslyn Gage and May Cheney – noting the ways in which non-hierarchical, feminist-inspired research practices were employed in attempts to connect...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peta Longhurst.

The mental asylums of the nineteenth century, influenced by the concepts of moral therapy and non-restraint, were intended to be curative environments capable of reforming the mad. The architecture and built environment of these institutions was in essence the treatment, making the asylums both highly ideological and also inextricably physical. Through a comparative analysis of four such institutions in New South Wales, this paper will examine the tensions between the social and material...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renée M. Blackburn. Suzanne Spencer-Wood.

Playgrounds contributed to several domestic reform movements. Community mothering in playgrounds formed part of social settlements, the public cooperative housekeeping movement, and the municipal housekeeping movement. Playgrounds were also part of the public health reform movement and the Cult of Real Womanhood that promoted exercise  to strengthen the working class and to address the perception of women’s sickliness in the Cult of Invalidism. In the City Beautiful movement playgrounds and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Springate.

There is more to the concept of reform than just change. The term suggests improvement and betterment -- but by whose definition and direction? Serving as an introduction to the Archaeology of Reform/Archaeology as Reform session, this paper explores the meaning and nature of reform and how archaeology can both illuminate and facilitate it.