HIST 386 assignments.

Course context

HIST 386 is an upper-division research seminar in American material culture. The course assumes students have completed the U.S. survey sequence (HIST 120 / 121) and are ready to treat physical objects — buildings, tools, dress, household goods, vehicles, printed ephemera — as primary sources for historical argument. The seminar runs in a workshop format: three weeks of methodological grounding, then twelve weeks of student-led research projects.

Assignment 1 — Object analysis (due week 4)

Each student selects a single object from a list provided in week 2 (or, with the instructor's approval, a comparable object of the student's own choosing). The 1,500-word analysis must answer:

• What is the object — material, dimensions, construction?
• What was its intended use, and what evidence (in the object itself or in associated documentation) supports that reading?
• What does the object tell us about the social and economic context in which it was produced and used?
• What evidentiary problems does the object pose — what cannot be known about its history from inspection alone?

Assignment 2 — Comparative analysis (due week 8)

Building on Assignment 1, students compare their object with two other objects of comparable type from a different period or region. The 2,500-word comparative paper must identify what features of the original object are period-specific, region-specific, or class-specific, and must engage at least three secondary sources from the material-culture literature on the object type.

Assignment 3 — Final research paper (due final exam week)

Each student designs and executes a research project that uses material-culture evidence as a primary source for a historical argument. The final paper is 6,000–8,000 words and must include a discussion of method (what the object evidence allowed the argument to do that documentary evidence alone could not) and a properly-formatted bibliography of both primary and secondary sources. A fifteen-minute presentation in the final week of the seminar accompanies the paper.

Working secondary literature

• Henry Glassie, Material Culture (Indiana, 1999) — foundational methodological text.
• Kenneth Ames, Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture (Temple, 1992).
• Bernard Herman, The Stolen House (Virginia, 1992) — material-culture biography of a single object.
• Selected articles from Winterthur Portfolio and Common-Place.
• Field-trip readings tied to the specific repository the seminar visits in week 6 (variable by year).

Field component

The seminar includes a one-day field trip to a regional decorative-arts collection — typically Winterthur in Delaware, the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, or one of the Northern-Virginia historic-house museums depending on the year's schedule. The field trip is held in week 6 and feeds directly into Assignment 2.