Projects Info

Address Project
description coming soon

Annotations Project
Due 11/24/09

Working with a partner, you should annotate a paragraph from Franklin Evans. Use the comments section of the paragraph blog post to publish your annotations.

ADD MORE TAGS!!

Information you can/should include:
— Critical Analysis: examine the passage and analyze its meaning. What phrases stick out to you? How might we understand them? How do they relate to the rest of the novel?

— Historical Context: consider the descriptions in the paragraph. What historical context is need to understand them? What would it be useful for a reader of this paragraph to know?

— Links: provide links to the following types of sources:
—- historical context
—- links to relevant websites
—- biographical context
—- related notebooks/manuscripts
—- related poems
—- images (illustrations, words, locations)

Think about the themes in Franklin Evans — how do they show up differently in FE and LoG?
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Where I Found Whitman
— description coming soon

Material Culture Museum Assignment

Due Dates:
10/13: Topic Selection Due
10/20: First Draft of Entry Due (password-protected blog post)
10/27: Second Draft of Entry Due (password-protected blog post)
11/3: Final Post Due (tagged “digitalmuseum”)

Assignment Background
Students in all Looking for Whitman classes will build exhibits in a digital museum that presents Walt Whitman’s life and work through examinations of discrete material objects. Students in each project location will focus on places, people, and objects that relate to the time Whitman spent in that location or the writing Whitman did while he was there. Our goal is to tie the study of history — and Whitman’s history specifically — to very concrete objects, in the same way that someone in the future might learn about our present culture by studying an iPod or a television set.

If you’re wondering what a “material object” is, the term basically refers to any physical object that can be found in the world — a pen, a book, a piece of clothing, a building, a manuscript page. Looking at history through by examining material objects represents an alternative way of thinking about history. People used to study history by looking at the stories of “great men” and large industries. In recent years, historians have shown that we can learn just as much, if not more, about a culture by looking at the everyday physical objects it contained.

In this assignment, you will pretend that you work in a museum and that you are putting together an exhibit on an object related to Whitman’s time in New York. Your goal should be to produce a well-fashioned and informative piece of writing that fulfills the following objectives:

Provides a scholarly, but readable, introduction to a specific material object
Thoroughly explores the general context of that object — its invention, development, and history of use
Discusses its physical properties — how it looked and felt, and what people wrote about it
Focuses on the relationship of that object to Whitman’s work

To see examples of the general type of work we’re looking for, please visit the virtual museum built at the University of Mary Washington in Prof. Jeffrey McClurken’s History of American Technology & Culture class.

Requirements

You must choose your object from the list below (objects will be assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. Simply email your preference to Prof. Gold)
Your research should consist of scholarly, college-level sources, whether electronic or print. Use the bibliographies in the things you read to find further sources!
You must use a minimum of four scholarly sources, and they should be meticulously cited in your entry. You will should provide a works cited page at the end of your post that provides complete citation information in MLA Format.
You must use at least one image in your digital museum entry. If you use more than one image, please identify which one of those images should serve as your entry’s iconic image on the navigation page for the museum. You must provide citation information for the images you use.
Your entry must be at least 1500 words (the equivalent of a six-page paper).
You must visit at least one New York Museum during the course of your research. See addendum for a list of NYC museums and archives that may be of interest.

Warnings

Make sure that you know how to quote from your sources responsibly, and that you understand the difference between paraphrase and plagiarism. If you have any questions about how to cite from or quote material that you’ve found, please get in touch.

Topics

Please choose an object from the following list. If you would like to research something that is not on this list, please get in touch.

New York Daguerreotype Galleries (Brady’s and Plumbe’s)

P.T. Barnum’s Museum

American Phrenological Journal

Bowery B’hoys

Brooklyn Daily Eagle

New York Aurora

Franklin Evans and Temperance Novels

Operas and opera singers reviewed by Whitman in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Prison Ship Martyrs Monument

The vault at Pfaffs