ABSTRACT
Lucy Maynard Salmon (1853-1927) was a professor of history, economics and political science at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. As the first instructor in these subjects at the women's college, Salmon had considerable latitude to develop her own pioneering ideas about how these disciplines should be undertaken and taught. By the tum of the twentieth century, she was committed to the study ofhistory and politics through the stuffof everyday life - newspapers, laundry lists, household goods, even the view right outside her door. Although Salmon has been 'rediscovered' as an intellectual influence only recently, her writings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries anticipate later trends in social history, the history ofdomestic life, material culture and cultural landscape studies.2
