The following research papers were written by students in the 2002 seminar, "Private Writings: Their Uses and Value for History and Literature," under the supervision of Helen R. Deese.
The following research papers were written by students in the 2003 seminar, "Imagining the Civil War : Race, Gender and the Popular Culture, 1860-1877," under the supervision of Carolyn J. Lawes.
The following research papers were written by students in the 2004 seminar, "Communication in the Early Nation: Literacy and Print in America, 1750-1840," under the supervision Catherine A. Corman.
The following research papers were written by students in the 2005 seminar, "Childhoods Actual and Imagined: New England, 1790-1860," under the supervision of Jack Larkin.
The following research papers were written by students in the 2006 seminar, "Personal Narratives from the Age of the American Revolution, Or Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times," under the supervision of Joseph Cullon, assistant professor of history at Dartmouth College.
The following research papers were written by students in the 2007 seminar, "Captive Histories: Puritan Captivity Narratives and Native Stories from the Era of the Colonial Wars, 1675-1760," under the supervision of Kevin Sweeney, Professor of History and American Studies at Amherst College, where he has taught since 1989.
In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, thousands of Americans wrote autobiographies and reminiscences. Successful men wrote their life stories to explain, celebrate, or justify their wealth or prominence. The pious recounted their soul-struggles and spiritual awakenings. Convicted murderers dictated their biographies in the days before they went to the gallows. Prisoners in the state penitentiary accounted for what had brought them there. Other Americans kept detailed diaries that explained their lives to themselves.
In this seminar, students investigated the roles that both natural and built environments have played in the development of American society. Over the course of the semester, the class moved from broad studies and images of America's environments to local histories of the Blackstone River Valley's natural and built landscapes. Over the first several weeks, the class discussed the "big ideas"- Wilderness and Landscape- that have shaped Americans' relationships with their many environments.
In this seminar, students were introduced to the interdisciplinary study of sexuality in early America through primary source research in the unparalleled archival holdings of the American Antiquarian Society. Over the course of the semester students moved from the study of prescriptions for appropriate sexual behavior to descriptions of many different forms of sexual experience.
Touted as the only nation where citizens could not be classed by their appearance, Americans were nevertheless anxious about the ways they presented themselves in a world without fixed social hierarchies. This seminar examined this crisis of self-presentation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, exploring the ways in which aspirants to genteel culture — as well as those excluded from it — employed dress, etiquette and deportment to personal and political ends.