Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Curious Objects.
Speaker: Behind every made object, there's an idea.
Speaker: Or maybe it's more accurate to say a hundred ideas.
Speaker: The way it looks, the way it's shaped, the materials it's made from, how big it is.
Speaker: None of these ideas spring forth fully formed out of the ether.
Speaker: There is no platonic form of a chair.
Speaker: There are only chairs made by people for people's needs and people's desires.
Speaker: And so the history of objects is in a sense a history of ideas.
Speaker: But sometimes one of these ideas can grow so large that it subsumes all the others.
Speaker: So powerful and persuasive, so central to a people's identity, that the object itself can almost be described as an idea.
Speaker: For the Magazine Antiques, I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: Last episode, we started to explore the story of the Shakers, the 18th century religious movement that has become synonymous in our popular imagination with perfection, especially in the realm of craft, and especially with regard to furniture making.
Speaker: We learned about one particular shaker sewing desk from the Enfield community in New Hampshire, using it as a guide for delving into the shaker system of belief and how that dovetails with their extraordinary skills as makers.
Speaker: We heard from one of the last living shakers.
Speaker: And by the way, I said last time that there are three living shakers, but I've been informed that the true number is now two.
Speaker: Today, we're going to flip the whole story upside down because even as the Shaker communities across the country started to shut their doors, outsiders began to take an interest in the Shaker craft tradition.
Speaker: And that meant whole new ways of thinking about these objects.
Speaker: The people they were made by and for were less and less a part of that conversation.
Speaker: Instead, as time went on, the community of collectors and enthusiasts and scholars grew up around these objects and transformed them from everyday objects of labor and devotion into revered artifacts and collectibles.
Speaker: The interest in shaker material followed the collecting of Americana and other antiques by a number of years.
Speaker: It was only in the 1920s when some of the villages were closing and material became available.
Speaker: That's John Keith Russell of the eponymous John Keith Russell Antiques.
Speaker: The original collectors were made up of Friends of the Shakers, such as Robert and Hazel Belfort, dealers and academics, Edward Deming and Faith Andrews, and contemporary artists, Charles Sheeler.
Speaker: You know, and by extension to Scheler, you had Juliana Force, who was the first director of the Whitney Museum of Art and also a neighbor of Scheler's.
Speaker: She held an exhibition of Shaker material at the Whitney in 1935, which sort of made for its unveiling or debut to the art world.
Speaker: Julianna Forrest subsequently became a Shaker collector, purchasing many items from Edward Andrews for her home here in South Salem, New York, which she named Shaker Hollow.
Speaker: A significant amount of Shaker furniture was also purchased by individuals looking to simply furnish their lake houses in New England, their cabins in the Adirondacks, or beach houses along the coast.
Speaker: And to them, this was just inexpensive, well-made secondhand furniture.
Speaker: An aside or an example would be a young law professor at Russell Sage College by the name of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who later became our revered senator here in New York.
Speaker: And he, at the suggestion of his head of department, John Upton, went to meet with the Shakers at Hancock in 1953 and purchased a truckload of Shaker furniture for 300 and some dollars, which was all he could afford for his first home.
Speaker: Okay, but hold on for a second.
Speaker: Why were the Shakers in a state of decline anyway?
Speaker: They had been doing just fine since the mid-1700s.
Speaker: Why in the 1930s were people starting to look at them as relics?
Speaker: I asked Brother Arnold Hod of the Sabbath Day Lake Shaker community in Maine.
Speaker: That's a complicated question.
Speaker: The Shakers here at Sabbath Day Lake peaked in the 1780s.
Speaker: So that was Revival.
Speaker: Revival brought them in, they couldn't sustain it.
Speaker: And so we went from 187 people down to about 90.
Speaker: And then that drops down again to about 50 to 60.
Speaker: And it's pretty steady here, 50 to 60, up until the 1940s.
Speaker: And then it's definite decline from there on.
Speaker: And part of that is we play demographics as well as anybody could.
Speaker: So you can say there's 70 people in this family.
Speaker: Right, but let's take a look at what that breakdown is.
Speaker: And usually it was only probably 20% of those were adults.
Speaker: So you get 80% of them are kids.
Speaker: And statistically speaking, kids don't stay.
Speaker: So this is your hope.
Speaker: But you may come back 10 years later and say, how many people are?
Speaker: And they say, there's 70.
Speaker: That's because 60 of the kids got to the maturity and left.
Speaker: And we just picked up 60 more kids.
Speaker: And so that's how that worked.
Speaker: So they continued this shell game in the hopes that they were going to get more members out of it.
Speaker: Sorry to interrupt, but where were these kids all coming from?
Speaker: Well, two places.
Speaker: One thing is that everybody thinks they were just from an orphanage.
Speaker: But it isn't just from orphanages.
Speaker: In fact, most likely they came from a single-parent household.
Speaker: So these are people who lived in the area who could get here, right here.
Speaker: You couldn't, as a single parent, survive.
Speaker: If you were a woman, you had no income.
Speaker: So you went to your family, you tried to find sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles who needed a kid on the farm, and that's where you'd go.
Speaker: If not, you went to a place like the Shakers to raise your kids for you.
Speaker: And if you were a man, you're
Speaker: So likewise, they did the same thing.
Speaker: So that's where most of the kids came from.
Speaker: And then after the Civil War, there were a lot of orphans.
Speaker: And the Shakers started to adopt in even larger numbers from orphanages,
Speaker: So then after the Civil War and as we move into the 20th century, I mean, you said that Sabbath day Lake, the sort of most dramatic decline was after 1940.
Speaker: Right, World War II.
Speaker: Yeah, so what was happening there?
Speaker: What was happening everywhere?
Speaker: This is the decade where you see people leaving farms and city life more than ever to get into the, I mean, country life to go to the city.
Speaker: because you only had to work five days a week, 40 hours.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: When you're on a farm, you don't get a day off.
Speaker: And it's a hard life.
Speaker: It's an unusual life.
Speaker: And so if you didn't have a real vocation to stay, you left.
Speaker: And the kids here were no different than anyone else.
Speaker: And it seemed very glamorous to be in the city, very glamorous to have another lifestyle that wasn't quiet and orderly like the Shakers were.
Speaker: So if you hadn't been imbued with faith, there was no reason to stay.
Speaker: And they didn't.
Speaker: And then what happens is that shortly thereafter, there's a lot of changes in how social agencies started dealing with religious communities and about placing kids here.
Speaker: So children that Shakers were able to get here in the 1950s and 60s were deeply troubled children.
Speaker: And the sisters had no training.
Speaker: They just had been kids who were raised at the Shakers and thought they could do the same thing.
Speaker: Well, they couldn't anymore.
Speaker: Life had changed.
Speaker: So the last child we had here left in 1966.
Speaker: And really, from the 1960s, they finally went back to looking to adults to come in to convert.
Speaker: It might seem a little counterintuitive, but ascetic religious orders can be quite prosperous.
Speaker: And the Shakers were no exception.
Speaker: Their business in agriculture and textiles and other trades was extremely profitable.
Speaker: And maybe that shouldn't be surprising given their work ethic.
Speaker: One of the draws for prospective members was surely the economic stability and quality of life.
Speaker: But industrialization and urbanization took the wind out of those sails.
Speaker: And Chakra communities found it harder and harder to maintain their membership numbers.
Speaker: Which is interesting because if we're to discuss the sewing desk,
Speaker: which is a very interesting and quite possibly unique shaker form.
Speaker: These desks, for the most part, were made in that period after 1860.
Speaker: And, you know, at that time, you had a change of, of,
Speaker: of need within the Shaker community.
Speaker: The number of brethren were diminishing, and the financial needs of the community were, for the most part, being turned over to the sisters.
Speaker: And the main source of revenue for the Shakers at that time were the fancy goods stores.
Speaker: You know, and I can, in my mind, see this scenario work out where, you know, a shaker sister says to a basically out-of-work shaker cabinetmaker, you know, gee, if I only had a workstation, I could be more productive in turning out the goods we need for our stores.
Speaker: And I could see these cabinet makers just tripping over each other to make these workstations.
Speaker: I've always had this thought with the sewing desk, so these really clever, skilled, highly skilled artisans really, with nothing to do.
Speaker: There was no need for creation of anything that demanded their skills.
Speaker: So, you know, when a sister said, hey, I could use a workstation here, you know, it's like, let's get to work.
Speaker: So this culture that the Shakers had developed, rooted in their fastidious labor, which had fostered their survival and prosperity for over a century, the material value of that culture and that labor was shifting.
Speaker: Music
Speaker: It wasn't enough anymore to work hard at agriculture.
Speaker: And by the 1920s and 30s, these once bustling Shaker villages started to look more and more like living museums.
Speaker: And like museums, they started to attract visitors.
Speaker: Here's John again.
Speaker: Well, you really had a number of visitors.
Speaker: motivations.
Speaker: I mean if you were friendly with the Shakers and
Speaker: they were looking to divest of materials, perhaps you would help them out.
Speaker: If you were a merchant and the best known of Shaker collectors, Edward Andrews was originally a dealer of
Speaker: English and American fine furniture who converted to the business of buying and selling Shaker and by extension became, you know, the leading author and author.
Speaker: expert in the field of of shaker Shaker material culture Then you had on the you know, then you had a group of individuals that were drawn to shaker material for aesthetic purposes and the best known of those was Charles Sheeler the the the artist
Speaker: some called the father of modernism.
Speaker: And he collected Shaker along these times in the 1920s.
Speaker: And, you know, it was his relationship with Juliana Force that saw to the
Speaker: the original showing of Shaker material in New York City at the Whitney Museum of Art.
Speaker: I think that the early collectors viewed the Shakers in a very positive way.
Speaker: I mean, these were kindly people living the Christian ethic.
Speaker: But I think that it was their material culture and the aesthetic of it that really drove them to acquire it, preserve it, promote it, study it.
Speaker: write about it, exhibit it, because none of those writings or exhibitions really went into great detail about the Shakers and their history.
Speaker: You know, I believe that as time has passed,
Speaker: and there has been an evolution of the interest in Shaker, that today there is a far greater interest in the Shakers and what they accomplished.
Speaker: If you think about the fact that the people looking
Speaker: at the material in the 1920s were looking at it cold.
Speaker: There was no real source of history afforded them of the Shakers.
Speaker: This was something that was accomplished in the decades that followed and continues to this day.
Speaker: And here's the thing about collecting.
Speaker: You don't just collect.
Speaker: You narrate.
Speaker: You learn what you can about an object, a maker, a style, a movement, or a period.
Speaker: And then you take that knowledge and you make a story out of it.
Speaker: For early collectors of Shaker furniture, the story around that furniture was everything.
Speaker: And that's still true today.
Speaker: So when I think about what I have learned through Shaker history, the lessons that I glean about our world today are about, for example, the value of work, the sense of purpose and accomplishment and connection that work can give us to ourselves and to each other.
Speaker: That's Sarah Margolis-Pineo, associate at John Keith Russell Antiques.
Speaker: And this idea that everyone, despite their race, gender, background, experience, perceived like quote unquote limitations, has something to offer the greater good, this larger human project, whatever that may be.
Speaker: We are these ritualistic creatures and we need space to consider and connect with larger ideas.
Speaker: whether it be through an established religious practice or yoga or using psychedelics.
Speaker: I mean, to each their own.
Speaker: I just know that there are aspects of the shaker routine and way of living and living together that are very meaningful and can teach us about cultivating meaning in daily life.
Speaker: So for an object like the Enfield sewing desk, between the time it was made and the time it left the Enfield community some 60 years later, its role in the world had completely transformed.
Speaker: It had gone from a working quotidian object crafted with care to fulfill the specific needs of a religious order to an artifact of that same order and a symbol of the values that order represents.
Speaker: But here's the thing.
Speaker: That religious order still existed.
Speaker: And it still exists now.
Speaker: And what the outside world imputes about that sewing desk might be quite different from how the Shakers themselves thought about it, or at least from how they think about it today.
Speaker: I asked Brother Arnold whether he would consider the sewing desk or any piece of historic Shaker furniture to embody Shaker principles or beliefs.
Speaker: Not really.
Speaker: I say not really because there is certainly something.
Speaker: That is to say, we didn't want it to be ornate.
Speaker: We didn't want it to be worldly.
Speaker: We wanted it to be functional.
Speaker: And that takes on a very different look wherever you might be because of the quality of the craftsman who lived in that community.
Speaker: Most people were not identified as being a carpenter.
Speaker: They were many, many things, and they just did...
Speaker: whatever furniture that needed to be done on the side.
Speaker: It was mostly being a farming community.
Speaker: That was a winter work of producing things.
Speaker: Lebanon, which is sort of an anomaly, you have people that are set aside because they had so many people.
Speaker: They had much greater need than most of us.
Speaker: And, you know, you can't see it, Ben, but we're in our music room and you look around and you are seeing lots of different things.
Speaker: And the reason you are is because when the communities formed, they didn't have a furniture factory.
Speaker: So when the conference came, they brought a bed, they brought a chair, they brought a table.
Speaker: Those became incorporated into the communal whole.
Speaker: And as they went on, they were passed on.
Speaker: And as we had needs for other things, specific things would be made.
Speaker: So we've always been consumers.
Speaker: We've never thought that if we could buy something more cheaply that way or it was better use of our time, that's what we did, because we had other things to do.
Speaker: And primarily what we have to remember here is we're not really concerned with a material culture.
Speaker: Unfortunately, we were very successful at it.
Speaker: And I always said that because it sort of acts as a,
Speaker: an anti-Shaker thing, because we are here because we are trying to find eternal salvation.
Speaker: This is a life of self-denial, it is the life of Christ taking upon ourselves that life in repentance, in penitence, and trying to find perfection.
Speaker: So, yay, to some degree you can say that comes through in a piece of furniture, but it's only as well as your skill can be.
Speaker: Shakers believe in progressive perfection.
Speaker: If I do something today as perfectly as I can, God willing, in five years, I'm doing it even better because I understand it more fully because I keep doing it.
Speaker: And so you can never, and that's our spiritual life, that's all wrapped up into the same thing, that we are progressing over and over again trying to find ourselves in a better place.
Speaker: But primarily, our life is not about the things around us.
Speaker: Our life is about heaven on earth.
Speaker: It's about preparing for the kingdom of God.
Speaker: So again, that's where it goes wrong.
Speaker: You know, when we see furniture up as, you know, when you put it out as a piece of sculpture instead of a chair that you're supposed to sit on, that's really not right.
Speaker: I know you can admire it.
Speaker: I understand it.
Speaker: I see it.
Speaker: I get it.
Speaker: But it's still perverse, you know, when you're really talking.
Speaker: Yeah, well, this is so interesting because I think the idea of perfection is certainly something that in outside popular culture is often associated with shaker furniture, the notion being that these makers were guided to want to make perfect objects and therefore they excelled and they eventually made perfect objects.
Speaker: But what you're saying is that
Speaker: that wasn't really the goal from the beginning to become very good furniture makers, that in fact, furniture of much lower quality were available and functional and would serve the purpose that you needed it to serve, that there would be no problem using that even if it's sort of appearance or its aesthetic ideas were very different from- You see, that's a problem, Ben.
Speaker: Shakers aren't aesthetics that way at all.
Speaker: We don't have our feng shui rooms.
Speaker: In fact, no one should actually ever see my office to know that that is not a place that anyone should be.
Speaker: And even I'm ashamed of it.
Speaker: But, you know, we have...
Speaker: We have five Boston rocking chairs made in the 1950s in here.
Speaker: Sister Miller bought those for the TV room so everybody had a place to sit.
Speaker: We have Brother Ted's grandmother's chair.
Speaker: We have two chairs that were owned by Aldous Herriot that were made in around 1900 or so.
Speaker: And then we've got some shaker furniture in here.
Speaker: We have
Speaker: uh these wonderful little back chairs that somebody gave us with Norman Rockwell scenes on them and harbor scenes you know it fits it works it's good um and another thing that's a disservice those and you were right that about and I'm not going to play down your your concept about if we are trying for progression we're trying it in all things that is true
Speaker: But what's a disservice is the 100 pieces that are carted out every time shows you only the very best pieces.
Speaker: It doesn't show you 99% of what was made, which was not so perfect.
Speaker: And there's very few furniture makers in the Shaker Life who reach that level.
Speaker: So that's the way that is.
Speaker: It's just kind of not represented perhaps from a very truthful side, rather it was from a collector's side.
Speaker: And most of these early people were not just collectors, they were dealers.
Speaker: So they had a real vested interest in this stuff and how to market it and sell it and make a living off of it too.
Speaker: See, Brother Arnold has a shaker perspective.
Speaker: That's John Keith Russell once more.
Speaker: I mean, he has a 20th or 21st century vision of what this is.
Speaker: I'm not aware that any other collector or any collector would have that perspective, you know, because they're looking at the objects in many ways without the...
Speaker: you know, the spiritual experience that Brother Arnold and other Shakers have gone through.
Speaker: You know, it's a lay person looking at all of this material.
Speaker: And, you know, if it's the opinion of those that are looking at this material that it is different and special
Speaker: you know, that's just a perspective that we have come to, whereas the Shakers, it was normal.
Speaker: You know, this was that kind of material that they lived with, they existed with, they developed.
Speaker: And though Brother Arnold
Speaker: spoke about the ladder objects that the Shakers made.
Speaker: We that have embraced Shaker material look at different stages of its manufacture.
Speaker: Now we are we are oftentimes able to tell
Speaker: Through styles and through even notes made on the furniture itself by the shakers when and where it was made.
Speaker: And there was a group of furniture that was made between 1790 and, say, 1820 that relied heavily on what we would call colonial influence.
Speaker: You know, the early shakers that were cabinet makers had their own styles that they brought to the shakers.
Speaker: They were used to making, you know, panel doors with a heavy raised panel, for instance.
Speaker: And so this was embodied into some of the work that they did.
Speaker: There's a period of time between 1820 and 1860, which we consider the high watermark of Shaker design, where they sort of went out on their own, if you will, and created what we honor the most today.
Speaker: And then after 1860, perhaps as they looked at their dwindling numbers and their lack of relevancy, they looked outside of their community for inspiration.
Speaker: So what happened with the collectors was they started to sort of invent their own stories, whatever that might be or not.
Speaker: And they started to produce a market.
Speaker: And the market drove itself and it drives itself really independent of the Shakers themselves.
Speaker: So we were like taken out of the equation.
Speaker: And if you think like Andrews who writes The People Called Shakers,
Speaker: in the 1950s, he like stops talking about the Shakers after the Civil War because what they produced was nothing he was interested in.
Speaker: And he saw it all through a material culture.
Speaker: So his history is, you know, lame to say the very least, but produced a great deal of ire in the Shaker communities.
Speaker: Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass., they sent somebody over to Hancock
Speaker: to talk to the Shakers about what they thought about the new book.
Speaker: And Brother Ricardo said, I don't like it.
Speaker: And he said, well, what don't you like about it?
Speaker: He said, I don't know, I haven't read it.
Speaker: And he said, well, how can you not like it?
Speaker: Because he's not a Shaker.
Speaker: And if you're not a Shaker, you don't understand this at all.
Speaker: And he's actually quite right.
Speaker: It's very hard for an outsider to understand how the life is.
Speaker: And in fact, we were able to get...
Speaker: a letter that Brother Ricardo had written to the publishers about how outraged he was about them calling him a shaker expert when he wasn't even a shaker.
Speaker: But shaker voices in the 20th century became quite muted and experts instead became the voice of what the shakers were all about, their material culture and their history and very little did they talk about their beliefs.
Speaker: You mentioned that
Speaker: it's very difficult to understand if you're not a shaker.
Speaker: What is that?
Speaker: What's difficult to understand?
Speaker: What could you try to tell me as an outsider that would help me to understand what we outsiders don't understand?
Speaker: I can't really, well, I mean, I can tell you, but you don't get it.
Speaker: It's a life of self-denial.
Speaker: It's this constant...
Speaker: walk with Christ that is unique to each of us and yet similar because as Christ calls us differently, we hear the voice differently and we act upon it in our own ability to understand it.
Speaker: But it is an antithesis of the world.
Speaker: It is not about possession and it is not about collecting.
Speaker: It is total surrender of yourself and your will to God.
Speaker: And in this particular place, in this particular manner,
Speaker: It looks nice from the outside.
Speaker: And it, Sister Elizabeth used to say, it's a great life if you don't weaken, and if you do, it's still okay.
Speaker: But the truth of it is, is this, that it is not an easy life, and it's not meant to be an easy life.
Speaker: It becomes easier as you get older, as you understand it, and you practice it more and more and more, but that's still not it.
Speaker: Sister Miller got up in meetings, she was 90 years old, and she said, I think I've just made a beginning.
Speaker: And she had been with the Shaker since she was seven.
Speaker: I was like, well, there's no hope for me.
Speaker: And it took me years to figure out what she was talking about.
Speaker: But now that I'm 65, I get what she's saying.
Speaker: I really do.
Speaker: As we begin to understand how much more work there is to do, that we can honestly say, I've just started.
Speaker: I'm really, you know, I haven't got this far as I had hoped so.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: It still brings, th is is where you're meant to be.
Speaker: It still brings you an inner joy that can't be really experienced unless you're in that place.
Speaker: So, you know, one of the quotes that I've heard all of my adult life is the
Speaker: Beauty of a shaker chair is that it was designed so that an angel might come and sit on it.
Speaker: That was not said by a shaker.
Speaker: That was said by Thomas Merton, who is a Trappist monk.
Speaker: And Brother Ted, who was over 300 pounds, in response to that said, yay, because an angel's the only one who would feel comfortable on one of them.
Speaker: But the thing of it is, is that, you know, a chair is a chair.
Speaker: In shaker life, a chair is a chair.
Speaker: And there are some chairs that say, you're too heavy, you can't sit on it.
Speaker: Or what that might be too.
Speaker: And we have examples of that where people have gone through caning in some of these chairs, et cetera.
Speaker: But I don't think the Shakers themselves are ever gonna start feeling like this is something close to being holy or venerated or we've gotta do something special.
Speaker: It's really easy, I think, to romanticize the Shakers and the beautiful villages that they created.
Speaker: And that's certainly what I did initially and what I continue to do because I can't help it when you step onto these very otherworldly campuses.
Speaker: But to me, what the Shakers demonstrate, I think, foremost is this very human capacity to build worlds for ourselves to live in.
Speaker: and imagine our lives otherwise.
Speaker: And especially right now, that is an appealing and perhaps really urgent thing to consider.
Speaker: The Shakers were just this group of ordinary humans who got together and somehow conceived and built and lived in these extraordinary material landscapes.
Speaker: So much about doing that is just utterly unconceivable.
Speaker: They literally moved mountains.
Speaker: I have no idea how they did it.
Speaker: And so the Shaker Village, when we look at it today, it's truly, it's a total work of art.
Speaker: It's a machine for living.
Speaker: It's all these things.
Speaker: And I think their relevance today is to send up to remind us that alternative systems of living exist.
Speaker: are possible.
Speaker: And if the Shakers could do it 250 years ago, we can certainly build more meaningful and beautiful ways of living today together in large ways and small.
Speaker: And I mean, we just, we just need the purpose behind it.
Speaker: So that's what's ultimately, I think, meaningful about the Shaker legacy for me personally.
Speaker: You know, when you think about an antique object, maybe it's an impressionist painting or an Egyptian sculpture or a medieval helmet, there is this impulse to think of it as a time traveler.
Speaker: as something that was made at one moment and then appears to us in this other moment.
Speaker: But the truth is, there's been a lifetime in between, or many, many lifetimes.
Speaker: And sometimes the object itself has changed through those lifetimes.
Speaker: It's been altered or damaged or restored.
Speaker: But the way people have thought about that object, the meaning they gave it, the interpretation they concocted, the power they ascribed to it,
Speaker: That always changes.
Speaker: And the power of this sewing desk is in part to open our eyes to this alien and radical world that produced it.
Speaker: But in part, it's to make us think, why am I seeing this object now with these eyes, with these interpretations?
Speaker: Why did someone else in the past or even the present see it with different eyes?
Speaker: What does a shaker see in it?
Speaker: We're happy to have that collection and we're proud to show it and let other people enjoy it.
Speaker: But to us, that's not really the point of it.
Speaker: we try to always contextualize it.
Speaker: So, you know, it's in this room, right?
Speaker: But why is it in this room?
Speaker: Because this is what everybody had to have a chair to sit on.
Speaker: Everyone had a bed.
Speaker: Everyone this, that kind of thing.
Speaker: But just put it in the context of the daily life of a certain time period.
Speaker: So maybe if I see anything that people can start to see that is a part of the life of a particular time, it wasn't something that was engraved and had to be there and everybody had to have a straight chair that was uncomfortable and
Speaker: that kind of thing, but rather you can see the progression that the material culture just followed the time period.
Speaker: It was adapted to its time and need.
Speaker: Just as shakerism has to be adapted to its time and need.
Speaker: You've been listening to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our social media and web support is by Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Mateo Solis Prada is our digital media assistant.
Speaker: Our theme song is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Miller.
