Barbara G. Carson, 1941–2011: A Tribute

“So what?” That, to Barbara Carson, was the crucial question. You’ve got a bunch of facts, some tremendously interesting artifacts, and a room to put them in; but “so what?” What have you done to make the facts and the things and the space matter?

Barbara asked this question for two reasons. The “so what?” question reminds the author to be critical of her subject, and it also prompts her to distill why the subject is important. Don’t just remember the details; force yourself to articulate why they matter.

The concept of a moveable feast is appealing, but spending time around Barbara was better; the world for her was a moveable salon. For Barbara, our purpose as historians and as informed citizens must be to examine and discuss, enlarge the circle to add new people and ideas, and then engage critically, appreciatively, and actively. This model is entirely portable. It works around a dining table at home or in a restaurant, in a museum gallery, on the street, or wherever the fieldwork might take you. It is an engaged life.

In Williamsburg, Barbara, myself, and others maintained a material culture reading group. The membership changed as our pool of available readers changed; we invited visitors who were in town on research fellowships or teaching or curatorial assignments. We were a mix of academics, museum professionals, and intelligent observers. We all happened to be married women, but despite what our husbands still think, we didn’t bother to talk about them. We talked about new books and articles, considering not only the intellectual contributions but also how well the author, the press, or the editors handled the illustrations, the paper, the captions. We visited exhibitions large and small and read the catalogs. We listened to each other’s talks and read each other’s papers in their nascent stages. We contributed observations of style or sources. But in all of these explorations the “so what?” question stood proud. How does this great expenditure of time, ideas, ink, paper, or wall space contribute to a conversation greater than the sum of its parts? Did the author merely display her knowledge or did the author actually use her platform to teach us something? And was it really something new?

Barbara liked the process of inquiry. Part of what made Barbara a great teacher was that she was a great learner. She loved to pull out an object and let it generate questions about its material, form, design, and use. Barbara loved challenging entrenched expectations of connoisseurship by teaching from everyday objects. Her opening challenge to material culture students was an analysis of a paper plate—with whatever florid decoration happened to be on the grocery store shelf that year. (Although, truth be told, Barbara was famously economical: the plates were reused from class to class whenever possible; last year’s decoration opened a discussion of fashion.) The “so what?” was the lesson that the same rigorous method of observation and description mattered whether the object was an important colonial Virginia building, Georg Jensen silver, or a disposable picnic product. Another lesson was that teaching from the familiar and everyday brings more students into the fold; they can then move with confidence to the more specialized objects in diverse museum collections.

Barbara was adept at using everyday moments to teach. When I covered classes for her, she made me give her an invoice that stated my fee—because, she said, women are too often hesitant to talk money, and she wanted to change that. Barbara and I had long conversations about the particular challenges faced by those of us trying to carve out our own careers secondarily to a partner established in a field or institution. She articulated the fact that very often what the second partner seeks isn’t necessarily title or salary, but something else: professional identity, an elusive trait that is instantly won with an institutional title but that takes years to build without one. Barbara used her particular interests to take her salon on the road, optimizing the mobility rather than the limitations of being adjunct...