Welcome to Vol. 48, No. 2

Abstract

In an interview quoted above, Marisa J. Fuentes explained her concept of “reading along the bias grain” that she used in her seminal study, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Her book is a call to rethink how historians can approach the absence of archival evidence to examine the lives of people in the past who left little or no written or material testimony. In Fuentes case, she explores women’s lives in eighteenth-century Barbados by “stretching the bias” of fragmentary sources, at the same time exposing how colonial attitudes silenced women’s voices in the archive. Another similar bias reading is Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Family Keepsake, a history of three generations of women from slavery to the early twentieth century through the analysis of a material object, a cotton bag embroidered with a few words denoting its family background. This analogy of “bias grain,” of course, has resonance for dress and textile scholars. Many authors for Dress have read between the lines to recover hidden stories of marginal or oppressed people. But not all evidence is “hidden.” There is still much work to be done with archival material that either has not been exploited or examined from the point of view of dress. Two articles in this issue draw on new and unexplored evidence. Elaine Farrell and Eliza McKee, in their article “Captured in the Clothing: Ireland, 1850s–1890s,” examined an Irish police gazette, the Hue and Cry. They collected data on descriptions of clothing from the 4,083 wanted notices to identify suspected criminals or missing persons. Clothing was important (of course!) in that identification. The data reveal much about what common people wore in Ireland. Thus, the authors have relied on an accessible Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Sleeping [Nideri]” New York Public Library Digital Collections.