Ivory for Cotton - Textile Trade Documents at the National Museum of American History
Author(s)
Shaw, Madelyn
Anderson, Amy J
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2018
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Working with objects in a museum setting takes curators on many unexpected journeys into the past. Such voyages can be one of the great rewards of the museum field. This essay recounts how a fragment of plain cotton cloth, made in South Carolina in 1904, but sold in Abyssinia, led to a tangle of trading ties that linked American cotton textile manufacturing with the trade in elephant tusks for much of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.Working with objects in a museum setting takes curators on many unexpected journeys into the past. Such voyages can be one of the great rewards of the museum field. This essay recounts how a fragment of plain cotton cloth, made in South Carolina in 1904, but sold in Abyssinia, led to a tangle of trading ties that linked American cotton textile manufacturing with the trade in elephant tusks for much of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.
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Journal Title
Curator: The Museum Journal
Volume
61
Issue
1
Subject
Curatorial and Related Studies
Commercial Services
Tourism