This course examines how U.S. cultures are constructed, reinforced, and changed, and how those cultures act simultaneously at a given time. To help students develop skills in cultural analysis, lectures will contrast various methods and perspectives as they apply to the study of a particular year or decade. Topics will vary from semester to semester.

What can we learn about American people, communities, and cultures by studying their stuff? In this class, we will closely examine the objects that were part of everyday life in the United States in the middle of the 19th century (approximately 1846 to 1877). As tensions between the North and South worsened and the nation descended into a devastating Civil War, ordinary people living across North America continued to live daily lives saturated with objects: they exchanged coins and bank notes, sewed clothing, prepared meals, mailed letters, used tools, shot guns, and cared for dead and dying bodies. While the objects themselves may have differed, people across the country depended on and drew from meaning from their stuff— whether they were enslaved families in South Carolina, immigrant neighborhoods in San Francisco, white middle-class families in Boston, or Indigenous communities on the Great Plains. By combining the methodology and sources of material culture with examinations of history and popular media, our interdisciplinary study of American stuff will consider what objects can teach us about culture, identity, and community in the shadow of war, and the lessons we can draw for our twenty-first century world. For American Studies majors, this course fulfills the Time and Pre-1900 requirements. This course also fulfills the American Cultures requirement.

Credit Restrictions

Students will receive no credit for AMERSTD 101AC after completing EDUC 130, ISF 103, EDUC C130, or UGIS 101. A deficient grade in AMERSTD 101AC may be removed by taking AMERSTD 101.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills