Collecting & History
Explore antiques, collectibles, material culture, preservation, identification, popular history, and the objects people have saved through generations.
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Recent Articles
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Vintage Colors and Collectibility
Aqua blue, pale yellow, soft pink, avocado green, harvest gold, burnt orange—sometimes a glimpse of color is all it takes to bring back a kitchen from decades ago. Vintage Tupperware has that effect. Even people who have never deliberately collected it often recognize a bowl their mother used for potato salad, the pitcher that always…
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The Birth of Tupperware-A Plastic Revolution
Today, plastic food containers are so ordinary that it is easy to forget how revolutionary they once seemed. Open almost any kitchen cupboard and you will find containers designed to stack, seal, travel, and keep leftovers fresh. In the years immediately following World War II, however, the idea of storing food in a lightweight plastic…
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What Is Actually Worth Listing on eBay? A Reseller’s Guide to Time, Profit, and Sell-Through
One of the easiest mistakes to make in reselling is confusing “I can sell this” with “I should list this.” Those are not the same thing. Spend enough time at estate sales, auctions, thrift stores, flea markets, and cleanouts and you will encounter an almost endless supply of merchandise that has some value. A $12…
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Wrap-Up-Functional Art on the Water
A good waterfowl decoy has always lived between two worlds. It is an imitation of a bird, but it was never created simply to look like one. It had to work within wind, water, distance, light, and the behavior of living waterfowl. Its shape needed to be recognizable from above. The body had to sit…
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Collecting and Preservation
A waterfowl decoy can carry several histories at once. There is the history of the bird it represents, the person or factory that made it, the region where it was used, and the hunting tradition to which it belonged. Then there is the history written directly onto the object: worn paint, repaired bills, anchor-line grooves,…
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Decorative and Modern Decoys
For centuries, the waterfowl decoy existed because it had a job to do. Whether woven from tule, carved individually by a hunter, or produced by a factory, the bird was ultimately judged by what happened when it was placed on the water. Did it float properly? Did its shape look convincing from above? Would real…
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