Gifts from home: Material culture and American immigrant women in the 20th century

This thesis will explore material culture by focusing on textiles and needlework of American immigrant women in the twentieth-century. It will feature three textiles: the Fishman bris dress from Britain, traditional Ukrainian embroidery, and refugee Hmong story cloths. Material culture is an interdisciplinary field that incorporates a wide variety of sources, theories, and interpretations. Social history incorporates voices and sources that have been disregarded in the mainstream narrative. Without scholarship in material culture, these sources would be lost forever. Textiles and their study allow for a wider and more inclusive interpretation of the American experience as immigrant and female. Most immigrant women do not hand down traditional primary documents. The everyday object allows historians to pursue historical imagination through material culture. Material culture scholarship and various sub-fields, allow these voices to be included in the canon of the American historical experience.