Abstract
Excavations for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, were conducted in the 2000s by Fever River Research to comply with federal Sect. 106 laws. The research yielded an extensive assemblage of domestic and commercial archaeological features. This case study focuses on Features 11 and 35 in the East Parking excavation block that yielded five bottles of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. Advertisements for the syrup showcased a radiant mother and her children and this imagery plays into nineteenth-century ideas concerning domesticity and motherhood; therefore, I consider the presence of multiple bottles of syrup recovered from a temporally well-defined stratigraphic range to explore the politics of gender, consumer choices, and advertising.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Floyd Mansberger and Fever River Research for generously allowing the use of the data on Springfield excavations. The detailed data and city history allowed for a close examination of the data and its meaning that would not have been possible without such meticulous record keeping.
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Verstraete, E. Soothing the Self: Medicine Advertisement and the Cult of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century Springfield, Illinois. Int J Histor Archaeol 27, 143–157 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-021-00644-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-021-00644-1