April White November 16, 2017
Frontier America in a Collection of Tin Cans
As Jim Rock traveled around the country in the 1980s and 90s, he carried a shiny black suitcase and a stack of 40 notecards. Inside the suitcase were artifacts of a not-long-past era of American industry: metal cans, often dented and rusted, each wrapped carefully in a white wool sock. On each of the typewritten and meticulously illustrated notecards was a distillation of years of research on can production methods, a topic most of his fellow archeologists considered to be, well, rubbish. What historical value was there in a 25-cent cylinder that once contained KC Baking Powder, or in an Acme Beer empty, or in a misshapen can found at a circa-1900 homestead, so weathered that its use was no longer recognizable?
April White
In History is Served, author April White guides us on a tour through the history of food.
For Rock, however, this litter was as important as shards of pottery from the Paleolithic. Each can told a story of life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, which some called the “Tin Can Civilization.”
https://daily.jstor.org/frontier-america-in-a-collection-of-tin-cans/
