As someone who studies material culture I try to bring this interdisciplinary field into my U.S. history classrooms as much as possible. I do this in several ways: choosing readings that are object-focused in their sources, assigning museum exhibits (or offering them as extra credit), bringing objects to class, and discussing images of objects as material culture.

So why take the time to talk about objects?

1) They shake up the routine. Students stay interested when they are presented with new kinds of sources for understanding history.
2) They engage visual and tactile learners. This is especially true when you are able to bring something that can be passed around the class. For example, I bring a 2008 Lowcountry sweetgrass basket to class when I talk about the Atlantic slave trade. Students are able to hold something in their hands that has stylistic routes going back hundreds of years and crossing continents, which helps them understand cultural continuities across space and time.
3) They often represent groups of people absent from the written archive. I have found this to be an especially useful tool when teaching women’s history; immigrants, enslaved people, free blacks, and Native Americans are also underrepresented in the written word.
4) They can prove or disprove the written record. For example, there is a wonderful documentary about the archaeological digs at Jamestown that thoroughly explains how scientists proved that these early settlers resorted to cannibalism through the examination of skeletal remains.
5) They get students interacting with the community. Here at Rice we are fortunate to live within walking distance to a world-class art museum, so assigning exhibits or lectures at that facility is fairly easy logistically. Many schools have art museums, history museums, or manuscript and archive collections on campus (sometimes archives have a random object or two among the papers), the staff at these facilities are usually elated and excited to be involved in your classroom. You can also look into assigning an online exhibit to your class, I have used the Star-Spangled Banner exhibit at the Smithsonian site several times.

I hope these thoughts and ideas encourage you to think about including objects in your classrooms, even if they must be represented through photos. Remember, too, that letters, diaries, and bound books are also objects—students often feel more connected to documents when they realize that a real person created that thing at some point, whether it contains written material or not.

Next month I’ll talk about the object below and how I use it to teach about U.S. history. This is a needlework picture in the collection at Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. I’ll also break down how to read this object as a source.