Through the study of lists of personnel and records of appointments, the chapter looks at Neapolitan music institutions and illustrates in details the central place of the Cappella Reale, the ensemble that participated in all the official ceremonies and represented the sonic embodiment of the Neapolitan royal power. A remarkable example of the court’s representational culture, the Cappella was impacted by the rulers’ shifting political agendas. The chapter traces the evolution of this ensemble, considering in particular the expansion of the string section during the early eighteenth century. The career of violinist Pietro Marchitelli, leader of the ensemble for about thirty years, is emblematic of the opportunities for social mobility available to some string virtuosi. The ascending trajectory of Marchitelli’s professional path – from his birth in a small village in the province of the Neapolitan kingdom, to his training at the Pietà dei Turchini Conservatory, and finally to his appointment in royal ensemble – is retraced through documentary evidence, such as bank accounts and notary contracts, and demonstrates the social status and wealth attained by musicians, with the support of powerful patronage and of cultural and artistic networks.

The chapter describes the central place of the four Neapolitan conservatories in the development of string pedagogy. New archival evidence and a reassessment of known documents allow the analysis of the financial and administrative structure of these educational institutions, the reconstruction of the artistic networks, and the admission process and daily teaching schedule of students. While the conservatories could guarantee a professional future to the children enrolled, the figlioli in turn constituted the main economic resource for these institutions. The pedagogical methods applied in these institutes were based on years of absolute dedication that exploited child labor. This systematic, if arduous, approach to music education played a crucial part in the professional training of the Neapolitan musicians and fostered the emergence of virtuosi whose fame became widespread in Europe. The details of the career of Giovanni Carlo Cailò, a Roman violinist who moved to Naples with Scarlatti and became the most influential string teacher in two of the four conservatories, explain the role and influence of a famed string maestro. A generation of eighteenth-century violin and cello virtuosi formed under Cailò contributed to disseminate the fame of the excellence of the string school established in the Neapolitan conservatories.

The conclusion to this book looks at the public afterlives of lynching objects as they move from personal collections into archives and museums. Through a study of several visual and material collections from lynchings, the chapter makes a claim for the persistence of lynching's material culture as part of an evolving historical conciousness. Further, this conclusion serves as a blueprint for a rethinking of the public historical interpretation of racial violence and of the rethinking of the entanglements between cultural heritage and racial violence.

The introduction lays out the methodology employed in the study, explaining how insights gleaned from studies of material culture, phenomenology, and performance studies can produce a powerful hermeneutic for understanding early modern pedagogical performance.

Edith Wharton’s archive consists of material held by over thirty institutions across North America and Europe. This essay demonstrates that the process of integrating the contents of Wharton’s archive into the study of her writing has been hindered not only by its immensity, generic diversity, and geographic distribution, but by its history. Sections of the essay address the uses of Wharton’s archive by her biographers; the significance of recently published archival documents which alter substantially our understanding of Wharton’s early career and work as a dramatist; material related to Wharton’s wartime experiences, a subject of renewed interest; and Wharton’s professional correspondence, especially her negotiations with her editors and publishers, which impacted the formal properties of Wharton’s fiction. The essay argues that Wharton’s archive remains a source of new information about the scope and variety of her achievements, and her creative processes.

Despite the extraordinary presence of rap and bounce in New Orleans and of New Orleans practitioners of these forms in the wider world, this expressive tradition has had little institutional support in a city that devotes great resources to other forms. For this reason, an archive was set up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to preserve this cultural history in ways that would give those closest to this world as much control over the archive as possible and preserve the cultural geography of pre-Katrina.