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MATERIAL CULTURE
HISTORY THREE HUNDRED:
THE STUDY AND WRITING OF HISTORY
PROFESSOR FLEMING
Office: Maloney Hall 445
e-mail: robin.fleminb@bc.edu
Office Hours Wednesday 1:15-3:00
Goals
Like all History Three Hundreds, this class requires commitment, hard work, and motivation. Our
seminars each Wednesday will combine discussions of common readings about material culture
with talk about the joys and pitfalls of using material evidence to write history, and with practical
exercises, progress reports, and Q&A.
Requirements
Attendance of each scheduled seminar is mandatory. If you do have to miss a class, you must
contact me before hand, and you must make up the class during my office hours within a week.
All readings must be completed before class.
You must bring a hardcopy of whatever readings we are dealing with to seminar each week.
Many of our seminars have a required writing assignment. You must bring a typed, spellchecked,
beautifully-written hardcopy of the assignment to class, because like the readings, these
written assignments will form the basis of our discussions.
You must complete and submit a very detailed, well-thought-out, first-draft of your paper,
along with complete primary and secondary bibliography on 4/11. Worry especially about
thesis, organization, argumentation, and documentation.
You must complete and submit a well-written, polished, and complete second draft of a fifteento
twenty-five-page research paper on 4/25.
You must read and comment on six classmates drafts in a special critique session.
You must rewrite your paper based on our class critique session and turn in your final research
paper by the day of the final (Saturday, May 12).
Grading
Three-quarters of your grade comes from your written work (that is, the weekly written
assignments, your various drafts, and your final paper. One-quarter of your grade is based on
your weekly preparation, your in-class participation, and the quality of the advice you give to
your fellow students (bibliographic and evidence advice and advice on rewriting rough drafts).
Required Readings
I will send most of the required readings to you as pdfs via email. You will need to purchase
one book: Karen Harvey, History and Material Culture: A Students Guide to Approaching Alternative
Sources (Abingdon, 2009).
Assignments and Seminars
1/18 Week One: Getting Started
We will discuss the goals and requirements of the class.
You will be introduced to material culture.
You will chose a period and a class of evidence (you will be responsible for writing something
about the evidence you chose and report on it next week in seminar).
You will also be given a list of potential topics that may produce interesting papers.
Elliot Brandow, an ONeill Reference librarian and history bibliographer, will give you a crash
course on doing history research in ONeill Library.
1/25 Assignment for Week Two: What is Material Culture?
Read:
Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison, Shaping the Field: The Multidisciplinary
Perspectives of Material Culture, in Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison, eds.,
American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (Knoxville, 1997), 1-20. (I will email you a
pdf))
Jules David Prown, Material/Culture: Can the Farmer and the Cowman Still be Friends?,
in ibid, Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture (New Haven, 2002), 235-42. (I will
email you a pdf)
Karen Harvey, Introduction, in Harvey, History and Material Culture, 123.
Giorgio Riello, Things that Shape History: Material Culture and Historical Narratives, in
Harvey, History and Material Culture, 2446.
Research
Examine the websites on the website document I have emailed you that are relevant to any
potential topics in which you might be interested. Use these websites to begin a bibliography
of your topic, by cutting and pasting relevant suggested readings into a word document.
You will add to this bibliography weekly, so keep a copy of it on your computer.
Look at the suggested readings in the relevant portion of the topics bibliography handed out
in class. Find some of these works at BC, and determine if this is the topic for you. Add this
material to your bibliography and go through these works footnotes and/or bibliographies,
and find ten books and/or articles that have something to do with your class of evidence and
your topic. Add these to your bibliography.
Go to the ONeill Library Website and click on Electronic Resources. Explore the options that
come up that look promising for your topic (there are many databases with diaries,
illustrated books, newspapers, etc.). Add these electronic resource sites to your bibliography.
Go to Google Book Search. Do keyword searches for your topic. Investigate the tables of
contents of books that look promising. If the tables of contents suggest that these books will
have material for you, add them to your bibliography.
Inter-Library loan any of the books and articles on the class bibliography and on your own
bibliography that you think will be helpful for your research project that we do not have at
ONeill Library. (Note which items on your bibliography that you have ILLed.)
Write:
Write two to three pages on the strengths and weaknesses of the class of evidence you chose
in seminar last week, describe the most interesting aspects of this evidence, and discuss the
kinds of basic historical questions your evidence can help to answer that you might not be
able to answer with a text. End your paper with a list of potential historical questions that
interest you and determine whether or not your evidence can be used for topics like these.
Append your bibliography. At least five of your references must be journal articles, and at
least two must have pictures/descriptions of your class of material evidence.
Discussion:
We will begin thinking about material evidence with a general discussion of the assigned
common readings.
Be prepared to make a five-minute (and I mean five-minute) presentation on your evidence to the
seminar.
2/1 Assignment for Week Three: How to Use Material Culture as Historical Evidence
Read:
Prown, Jules David, Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and
Method, in ibid, Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture (New Haven, 2002), 69-
95. (I will send you a pdf)
E. McClung Fleming, ed., Artifact Study: A Proposed Model, in Thomas J. Schlereth,
Material Culture Studies in America (Nashville, 1982), 162-73. (I will send you a pdf)
Dupont, Jean-Claude, The Meaning of Objects: the Poker, in Gerald L. Pocius, ed., Living in
a Material World, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Social and Economic Papers, 19
(1991), 1-18. (I will send you a pdf)
Karin Dannehl, Object Biographies: from Production to Consumption, in Harvey, History
and Material Culture, 12338.
Sara Pennell, Mundane Materiality, or, Shoud Small Things Still be Forgotten? in Harvey,
History and Material Culture, 17391
Write:
Decide which of our five articles offers the best model of material-culture analysis for you,
and use this model as a way of thinking about your own evidence. Write a one- to two-page
analysis of a single piece of material evidence relevant to your research, and include a Xerox
picture of your object with your assignment.
Append a list with the names of five basic journals that will help you with your research. To
determine this, go to JSTOR and Hollis and do word searches in the database relevant to your
topic, and see which journals come up most often.
Make a list of five presses or publication series that you think publish interesting and
valuable scholarly research in your field of interest.
Find two websites that you have determined contain scholarly information useful for your
topic, print off their home pages, and explain, in a paragraph, how you have come to
determine that these sites are reputable and valuable.
As you work through this material, add books and articles on your subject to your
bibliography. ILL these new references if BC does not own them. Append your new and
improved bibliography to your written assignment.
Discussion:
Which approach did you like best and why? What are the advantages of using material
culture? What can it tell us that texts cannot? What different kinds of historical questions can
you ask of this evidence?
Be prepared to discuss both the object you wrote about and your ideas for a paper. We will discuss
each paper idea in turn, and see if we can, as a group, fine tune everyones ideas, make bibliographic
suggestions, etc. The articles from last week and this week provide some helpful methodological and
theoretical models for dealing with material culture. I will expect to see at least some of this reading
reflected in the introductions of your final research papers.
2/8 Assignment for Week Four: Material Culture in Action
Read:
Deetz, J., Small Things Remembered, in idem, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of
Early American Life, 2nd edn (New York, 1995). (I will send you a pdf)
Anne Laurence, Using Buildings to Understand Social History: Britain and Ireland in the
Seventeenth Century, in Harvey, History and Material Culture, 103122.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, The Industrial Revolution in the Home: Household Technology
and Social Change in the Twentieth Century, in Thomas J. Schlereth, Material Culture Studies
in America (Nashville, 1982), 222-36. (I will send you a pdf)
Fleming, Writing Biography on the Edge of History, American Historical Review, 114 (2009),
606-14. (I will send you a pdf)
Write:
Write two pages research proposal, which includes the topic and period you have
chosen, a discussion of the kinds of material evidence you would like to use, and the
questions you hope to answer.
By this point, you should be getting things from ILL. Add the relevant books and articles
to your working bibliography. Append this bibliography to your written assignment.
Discussion:
Have the authors of the articles you read this week convinced you that the arguments
they are making are supported by the evidence? Is the balance between explaining how
to use evidence and making interpretations based on the evidence right in these article?
Have the four articles changed your ideas about what constitutes historical evidence?
Which of the four did you like best, and why? How important is it to contextualizing
material evidence? What made these articles use of material culture successful? How do
they integrate written and material evidence into their arguments?
Be prepared to report on your proposal, and to help your classmates think about their choices of
topics, evidence, and historical questions
2/15 Assignment for Week Five: Chasing Down Evidence
Read:
Read what you determine to be the most important publications containing primary
evidence for your paper.
Write:
Follow footnotes. Chase down five interesting citations from whatever you are reading,
write out a list of these footnotes, and then find and read the cited articles or book
chapters. ILL any works in interesting footnotes that are not in the BC or BU libraries.
Print out the results of a HOLLIS subject search for your topic and a JSTOR search. ILL
all relevant material not housed at BC or BU.
Discuss:
At the beginning of class everyone will give brief individual reports on their search for
evidence. We will then have an information swap. You must come ready to suggest at
least six publications, primary evidence sources or web/published sources with relevant
objects to other members of the seminar and at least six secondary interpretive pieces that
you believe will help others think about their own topics.
Be prepared to talk about your evidence and give suggestions about evidence to others in the
seminar.
2/22 Assignment for Week Six: Objectives of Historiography
Read
Find two articles or book chapters in your bibliography which disagree with one another.
Discussion:
Why read authors with diametrically opposed arguments? Which of your two authors
do you think is (more) right? Did the authors use the same or different evidence? The
same or different secondary literature? Write in the same or different decades? How do
answers to these questions affect your judgement? What is the difference between
different evidence and different historical arguments? What should historians do with
secondary literature with which they do not agree? With sources that go against their
theses?
Write:
Write a three-page research plan. It needs to include a summary of the historical
question upon which you have settled. Tell us how your topic engages in an important
historical debate (and footnote the works of authors involved in this debate), describe the
kinds of evidence you will use to answer your question, and end with a general
discussion of the kinds of available primary sources and secondary work on your topic.
Append a bibliography with at least thirty items divided between primary and
secondary literature.
Be prepared to present your new-and-improved research plan to the seminar. And be prepared
to chip in with suggestions for others in the seminar.
2/29 Assignment for Week Seven: Individual Meetings
Rather than meeting as a group, each of you will have an individual meeting with me to assess
where, exactly, you are in your research, your thinking, and your writing. Since we will not meet
again until the Wednesday after Spring Break, it is crucially important that you start writing after
this meeting.
3/7 Assignment for Week Eight: Spring Break
No class.
Research, write, fill in holes in your arguments, and then write some more.
3/14 Assignment for Week Nine: Making Progress
Read
Tips for History Papers.
Be prepared to give a progress report on your work and make suggestions for other students
papers.
3/21 Assignment for Week Ten: Individual Meetings
Rather than meeting as a group, each of you will have an individual meeting with me, to see
where, exactly, you are in your research, your thinking, and your writing.
You will bring with you a 23 page discussion setting out the ideas (footnoted) you will be
drawing from in your paper from the theoretical and methodological readings we did in the first
week in class. A version of these pages will appear in the final version of your paper.
3/28 Assignment for Week Eleven: Documenting Historical Arguments
Read
Its not rocket science. [a.k.a. Idiots Guide to Footnoting] (I will send you a pdf)
Discuss
We will have a hands-on, writing-a-real-footnote workshop.
By the end of the day all of you are going to be writing heart-breakingly beautify,
completely correct footnotes.
Write
Write a footnote (following the Web-Ct handout Its not rocket science for a reference
to:
a first citation of an article, and then a second citation of the same article
a first citation to a book, and then a second citation
a book published in a series
an individually authored chapter in a book
a primary source
an electronic source
Be prepared to perform like a circus animal, to write a proper footnote in public, and to correct the
footnotes of others involved. There will be food incentives for star performers.
4/4 Assignment for Week Twelve: Individual Meetings
Rather than meeting as a group, each of you will have an individual meeting with me, to see
where, exactly, you are in your research, your thinking, and your writing.
Write
You will present a well thought-out outline of your paper, which we will discuss in
detail.
4/11 Assignment Week Thirteen: First Drafts Due: Discussion of Problems
Write
The first draft of your paper is due at the beginning of this class.
Be prepared to talk about your paper as it now stands and to participate in a general discussion of
the problems your are having in forming a thesis, incorporating secondary literature, using
primary evidence, framing your argument, etc.
4/18 Assignment Week Fourteen: Individual Meetings
Rather than meeting as a group, each of you will have an individual meeting with me. I will
offer detailed critiques of your first draft at this meeting. You will then rewrite your paper as a
second draft.
4/25 Assignment Week Fifteen: Second Drafts Due:
Discuss
We will break into two groups, and each group will be responsible for reading and
critiquing six other papers in seminar.
These meetings will probably take three to four hours.
Write
Bring eight copies of your paper (one for me, one for you, and six for fellow students).
We will disseminate your written work and then meet the following week for critique
sessions.
5/2 Assignment for Week Sixteen: Critique Sessions
Write
Fill in a Critique Session Form for each of the papers you are reading. Give helpful,
concrete suggestions on how to improve each paper.
Be prepared to talk, in general terms about what you learned about historical writing from reading
other peoples papers. Also be prepared to talk specifically about each paper in ways that will make
the final rewrite productive.
Final Draft Due Saturday, May 12
Write:
Re-write your paper based on critiques and suggestions that came out of your critique
session.
Hand in copies of drafts one, two and three.
Hand in copies of all the Critique Session Forms you were given by fellow students.
CHOOSING YOUR TOPIC
Although everyone in class will do a material culture project, that is, a paper which not only uses
texts as evidence, but things, you will be allowed to work on a fairly broad range of topics.
Still, you will have to work on some combination of the time periods and topics listed below,
because material evidence is not widely available, published or in English-language publications
for all topics.
Bearing all of this in mind, on the first day of class you will chose two things from each of the
following four categories. From these choices, I will help you pick a topic that I think most
closely matches your interests. You will be allowed to switch topics the next week, however, if
after looking into what you have chosen for a week, discover that it really is not for you.
PICK THE TIME PERIOD THAT IS OF MOST INTEREST TO YOU
Rome
Early Middle Ages
Late Middle Ages
Early Modern Britain
Colonial America/Eighteenth-Century Britain
American West
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain/America
Cold War
PICK THE TOPIC THAT IS MOST INTERESTING TO YOU
Urban History
Ritual/Death/Religion
Class/Social Differentiation
Race/Slavery
Gender
Economy
Demography
Everyday Life
Social History: Childhood/Domesticity/Family
Warfare
PICK THE CLASS OF MATERIAL EVIDENCE THAT MOST INTERESTS YOU
Archaeological artefacts
Human bones
Art works/Treasure
Objects from everyday life
Architecture
Food
Textual descriptions of things (e.g. probate inventories, cookbooks, catalogues, etc)
Books as objects
PICK THE SOURCE OF MATERIAL CULTURE THAT IS MOST APPEALING TO YOU
Graves
Built environment
Print (includes 2 dimensional objects, like pictures, etchings, maps, etc.)
Underwater archaeology
Museum objects
Material housed in the Burns Library Archives
Material housed in the Schlessinger Library Archives