105 research outputs found
Silk in New England: From Sericulture to Status Symbol
No full textMadelyn Shaw is an independent curator and textile historian. She traced the rich legacy of silk in New England from its 17th-century origins to its rise as a driver of regional industry. The production of silk began with home-based sericulture in Virginia and Connecticut and later evolved into mill-based manufacturing. The 1830s saw a silk craze in New England that faded when a disease killed the mulberry trees whose leaves fed the silkworms. Later, imported raw silk from China became more affordable for the middle class, and American mills helped popularize silk garments. Although silk declined in the 20th century due to the war between China and Japan and the rise of synthetic alternatives like rayon, the silk industry’s impact on textile production in New England was considerable
Fabric of War: Why Wool?
No full textThis video, produced with funding from Australian Wool Innovation, is part of the Fabric of War creative Research Project, which is shared by Trish FitzSimons and Madelyn Shaw.
Fabric of War is a transnational commodity history that explores the strategic dimensions of wool. For 150 years wool was Australia's main export commodity and it continues to be the world's largest wool producer.
Fabric of War: Why Wool explores the history of how wool as a fibre became so strategically important and the chemistry of why its properties made it peculiarly suited for this task.
This history becomes a vital complement to the story of Australia as the nation that 'rode on the sheep's back' by providing an account of why so much wool was necessary, how this was a crucial underpinning to the growth of mass cold climate warfare in the twentieth century and how this relates to diplomatic and economic histories of Australia and other nations.Full Tex
The Family of Francis Marion Shaw Newsletter Volume 20 Number 1
No full textThis item contains 1 PDF file with 4 pages in addition to 4 JP2 filesThis newsletter profiles Jesse Curtis Shaw, a grandson of Francis Marion and Rachel Moore Allen Shaw, whose life was marked by varied occupations and a unique family dynamic. Born in Willacoochee, Georgia, he initially worked in a turpentine operation before his family turned to farming. His formal schooling ended after the 8th grade at Beaverdam school. Curtis held several jobs, including a commercial sales clerk and meat cutter in Valdosta, Georgia, and Orlando, Florida. His long time position was as a fireman with the U.S. Naval base in Sanford, Florida. He was married twice: first to Nona Ruth Fendley Eubanks, who died in 1944, and then to Madelyn Smith Judge in 1946. Despite never having biological children, Curtis became a devoted stepfather to Madelyn's daughter Peggy, and was known as the "Father of None, Grandfather of Many," embracing a large legacy of grandchildren and great-grandchildren through his stepdaughter. Curtis battled colon cancer from around 1964 and passed away in October 1965 in Orlando, Florida
Exploring crystallographic compatibility in polycrystalline Cu-based shape-memory alloys
No full textThis electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Thesis: S.B., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, June, 2019Cataloged from the official PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 47-49).Shape-memory alloys (SMAs) are a class of materials that can recover from apparent permanent strain (on the order of 5%) due to a solid-to-solid phase transformation. It has been recently suggested that SMAs satisfying a set of so-called cofactor conditions possess perfect interface compatibility and additional microstructural flexibility during transformation, which are theorized to result in excellent reversibility. Cu-based SMAs are cheaper than other alternatives, but polycrystalline Cu-based SMAs are unable to withstand many cycles because they are prone to cracking and degradation of functional properties. Previous research has identied improved shape-memory properties in Cu-Al-Ni-Mn SMAs in the oligocrystalline state, but polycrystalline material of the same composition has yet to be characterized. In this thesis, I characterize the compatibility of Cu-Al-Ni-Mn alloys according to the cofactor conditions and correlate these findings with results from superelastic mechanical cycling. Building on this knowledge, I also present a new alloy design that is predicted to meet the cofactor conditions and provides a promising path forward for a functionally stable, low-cost, polycrystalline Cu-based SMA.by Madelyn Payne.S.B.S.B. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Materials Science and Engineerin
Ivory for Cotton - Textile Trade Documents at the National Museum of American History
No full textWorking 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.No Full Tex
Book Reviews
No full textReviews of the following books: An Upriver Passamaquoddy by Allen J. Sockabasin; The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories by Elizabeth A. DeWolfe; American Silk, 1830-1930: Entrepremeurs and Artifacts by Jackqueline Field, Marjorie Senechal and Madelyn Shaw
The Fabric of War: Wool and Local Land Wars in a Global Context
No full textDuring the nineteenth century, exponential growth in sheep pastoralism in Australia and New Zealand, and in less predictable locales such as the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) and Rapanui (Easter Island), fueled the alienation of Indigenous peoples from their lands. The sheep and their wool, at the heart of these ‘grass wars,’ fed a global industry that supported another kind of war – the mass, cold climate warfare characterizing the century between the Crimean and Korean wars. Not until the second quarter of the nineteenth century did mechanization and factory organization affect wool production, as assiduous Australasian sheep husbandry bred wool staples long and strong enough to bear the stresses of industrial modes of textile production. This led to British imperial leadership in wool production, in its colonial territories (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa), and in locations such as Rapanui, not British by nationality but driven by British capital. So important and lucrative was the market for wool that the British-Chilean company, Williamson Balfour, which ran Rapanui as a sheep station from 1897-1953, allowed the sheep the run of the island while forcing the islanders to live in fenced compounds. Meanwhile, the important producers of woolen textiles—the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, and eventually Japan—could not rely on domestic fleece to fill their manufacturing needs, and imported heavily from British-controlled wool markets, particularly in wartime. New Zealand and Sandwich Islands wool, for example, helped clothe the Union Army during the American Civil War. This paper, part of a larger project exploring the relationship between wool and war, examines how, in the industrial age, the “deep local” effects of taking land from indigenous populations and turning it over to sheep pastoralism both encouraged and was encouraged by the “pan-global” trade in wool that resulted.Full Tex
Wool, paper, dye: 1917 and the roots of the synthetic fibre revolution
No full textIn the Great War, wool was as essential to success as steel and gunpowder. All combatant nations tried to ensure continuing supplies of this vital resource, but none so successfully as Britain, whose Australian and New Zealand dominions were key sources of the apparel wools sought after for military uniforms and blankets. Wool was a lynchpin in Allied planning in 1917 and the subject of negotiation, intrigue, and anxiety: how could the United States possibly send its troops—suitably attired for Europe’s trenches—as soon as they were needed, in the face of raw materials shortages, including wool?
This article first addresses the complexities of British control of the Australasian wool clip during the First World War. It then looks at how this led the American and German textile industries to seek substitutes—shoddy (recycled wool), Peruvian cotton, paper yarns, regenerated cellulose, silk, and jute—and eventually, synthesised fibres. Next examined is why and how research and development in fibre technology was rooted in the field of dye chemistry, then largely controlled by Germany. Deprived of German dyes for a wide range of products, United States’ companies, notably the DuPont Corporation, entered the field in 1917, setting the stage for later breakthroughs in synthetic fibre technology. It took several decades for wool to lose its primacy in war and peace, but the First World War hastened that end. 1917 was a pivotal year: its challenges, opportunities, and actions affected global textiles in ways that still resonate today.Full Tex
Fabric of War: The lost history of the global wool trade
No full textFew in 2019 appreciate that the throwaway culture of textiles in which synthetics are so prominent, came into being partly as a result of contrived shortages caused by military demand for natural fibres, most especially wool. Wool is critical to understanding military strategy in the modern era and in turn military uses of this fibre have shaped contemporary civilian society and our uses of textiles.Full Tex
Where Can Objects Take You? The Case of the World War II Japanese Airman's Suit
No full text“Dad always said that ‘It's made out of Australian wool,’ and I thought that was just a joke because you couldn't see how the Japanese would get hold of Australian wool during the war …But it is a fine material… They weren’t scrapping for something to wear.”
Wally Lanagan
In December 1942, the Yokosuka Military Department manufactured, surely among hundreds of others, a flying suit, which may or may not have ever been worn by a Japanese pilot. It did, however, end up on display at the Pioneer Park museum in Dalby, a small town in rural Queensland, Australia. It was lent to the museum in the early 2000s by the nephew of the Australian soldier who brought it home as a souvenir at the end of World War II.
There it rested, until the authors noticed it in May 2019. Through the dusty glass of the display the suit had an odd sheen – was it wool? cotton? A blend? An inquiry to the caretaker led to the unlocking of the case, and the discovery that the fabric was indeed a blend - but of rayon and wool. Another inquiry led to the lender, and the intriguing story of its arrival in Dalby and its place in a complex family history.
And to the quotation at the top of this page … And thence to the National Archives of Australia, to search the records of the textile trade between Australia and Japan in the years between the two world wars.
This paper highlights a digital media interactive that melds a 3-D scan of the suit with relevant documents, images, and text. It explores how this one garment embodies both decades of international bickering over resources, natural and man-made, and a transitional moment in the fabrics of war.Full Tex
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