Ordinary Things, Ordinary Lives, Ordinary Days Across the Centuries

[...]he leaves us wondering whether there is a daily life that encompasses the ordinary and repetitive and yet applies to those who produce the "things" that will give others the choices that transform daily life? [...]just as Amato explores the tug between nostalgia and progress in the nineteenth century, the book itself, without taking sides, lets the reader balance the tug of the past against the promise of the future over the entire chronological sweep of daily life. [...]that the specific uses to which people put looking glasses ranged beyond a "rational tool of self-discovery," to include divination, deflection of dangerous images or spirits, and signaling devices, and that these uses persisted even as the dominant culture associated mirrors with accurate self-reflection (p. 113). [...]most inventively, Shrum argues that mirrors contributed to the way white men maintained control over women, and the way whites, more generally, established their dominance over Native Americans and Afro-Americans, even as those people established their own meanings from their use of mirrors.