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PhD. American Civilization
Brown University, 1987
American material culture & technology, communal studies, American family history, popular literature, history of education.
Dr. Brewer earned a B.A. in History from Williams College in 1977 and spent several years working at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, MA before beginning graduate school. During graduate school, she also worked as an interpreter and curator at Slater Mill Historic Site in Pawtucket, RI. It was these experiences that convinced her of the value of artifacts as historical sources.
A historian of everyday life, she is interested in the connections between how Americans lived in the past (including housing, diet, work and family life, schooling) and what they believed and valued. Her courses emphasize the critical analysis of primary sources (including artifacts) in their cultural context. Her philosophy of teaching is aptly summarized by this quotation from Mark Hopkins’s presidential inaugural address at Williams College in 1836: “We are to regard the mind ... not as a piece of iron to be laid upon the anvil and hammered into any shape, nor as a block of marble in which we are to find the statue by removing the rubbish, nor as a receptacle into which knowledge may be poured, but as a flame that is to be fed, as an active being that must be strengthened to think and feel.”
Shaker Communities, Shaker Lives. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986.
From Fireplace to Cookstove: Technology and the Domestic Ideal in America. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000.
“Our Little College World”: Student Life at Northern Women’s Colleges, 1865-1930.