abstract: At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico played an important role as a transit route facilitated by the construction of an interoceanic railway that enabled the transport of goods primarily from the United States. At that time, the area’s population inhabited two types of housing differentiated by materiality and associated with social class. Palm-thatched houses were common for ordinary people, while adobe and brick houses were built for local elites. Abrupt sociocultural changes in this period led to the emergence of a new type of dwelling that quickly spread throughout the region. This new housing type— locally known as casa de barro , or “house of mud”— featured a wooden structure, wattle-and-daub walls, and a wooden and tiled roof. Following the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, the region’s economic boom came to an end and regional development diminished. Some of these houses still exist today; a few remain inhabited, others have been altered, and some have been repurposed as household storage spaces. Through explication of the casa de barro, this article examines how global economic forces and national political agendas drive territorial changes that, in turn, reshape the vernacular landscape.
This article explores the role of domestic workers and domestic labor in the administration, preservation, and interpretation of historic house museums in New England in the twentieth century. Whereas previous scholarship has framed house museums as a new kind of institution, this article argues instead that the material and spatial conditions of historic house museums enabled early museum administrators to adapt preexisting systems of domestic labor to historic site administration. Domestic workers thus emerged as some of the earliest frontline staff at house museums responsible for the care, display, and interpretation of material culture at these sites. To explore this phenomenon, this article examines the work ofthe Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) and its founder, William Sumner Appleton, who made the employment of domestic workers a matter of administrative policy for the organization in the early twentieth century. The article concludes at the end of the twentieth century, when professionalization in public history and historic preservation encouraged many museum administrators to transition house museums back into private homes where homeowners assumed domestic housekeeping responsibilities. Ultimately, this article traces an alternative origin story for the labor systems underpinning the public history workplace by fore-grounding the material and architectural conditions of house museums.
