Bedlinen at the Minnesota Historical Society

Hospital interior, 3rd Division, First Army Corps, Camp Hamilton, Lexington, Kentucky. 1898.

Source: “The Work Of The Medical Department During The Spanish War. Report of the Surgeon-General of the Army to the Secretary Of War”. Washington: Government Printing Office. 1898

I study the role of cloth in everyday life, examining domestic textiles and bed linen—the material culture of sleep. I am an independent research fellow and Legacy grantee with the Minnesota Historical Society. I work with the archives of the Gale Family Library and the textile collections of the MHS, describing the transference of the creation, economy, and consumption of bed linen from manual and domestic to industrial modes of production and consumption in Minnesota in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The blog on bed linen: here

I focus on the discourse around bed linen in the advertisements and editorials in Minnesota ladies magazines and Twin Cities newspapers. Another direction of research is textiles in the Red Cross relief effort during Spanish American War in Minnesota. Here I explore the conflation of domestic material culture and warfare and the extended role that bed sheets played in this dramatic encounter, becoming bandages for wounds and compresses for fever.

Newspapers excerpts: here