ABSTRACT
The purpose of my work on Mormonism (Leone 1979) was to link present and past and the role of things—material culture—to the ability to make life work. As I was finishing my work on Mormonism, I was searching for a way to understand how history was used in the United States as a whole, and had begun trying to study Colonial Williamsburg. I decided that I had to seek out a historical environment in Colonial Williamsburg that could be described as analytical of the modern United States. My motivation was to find an exhibit that worked the way I hoped public exhibitions could work, in general.
