"A major contribution to the history of education and the material culture of childhood, this book is one of the few to show how an educational theory was implemented in actual classrooms. Much more than a study of the first modern educational fad, this work explores the Americanization of European educational ideas, the use of object lessons in racial socialization, and how a largely forgotten vocabulary shaped nineteenth-century political discourse." --Steven Mintz, author of Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood "In this terrific book, Sarah Carter takes us back to a nineteenth-century world, now almost entirely forgotten, where ideas were taught with things and 'object lessons' were not simply metaphoric. And in taking us on this journey she raises all sorts of questions about how we teach, how we learn, and how we know. Really smart." --Steven Conn, author of Do Museums Still Need Objects? "Sarah Carter has written a learned intellectual history of the nineteenth-century foundations of material culture theory. Attentive to the desire of educators to use real objects to promote critical sequential thinking, the mid-century fascination with taxonomical classification of the natural and manufactured world, the moral underpinnings of thinking with and through objects, and the use of object studies as a form of racial objectification, this volume delineates clearly the complex, often fraught, relationship between thinking and 'thinging.' Carter sees object lessons as both method and metaphor, system and justification, truth and fiction. As result of this study, the material turn in art history, literature, and history can now be more fully understood." --Edward S. Cooke Jr., Charles F. Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Yale University