Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 15, No 4
Summer 2001

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

Object Lessons: Material Culture on the World Wide Web

Charlene Mires

In keeping with the proliferation of web sites devoted to artifact-rich world’s fairs, the Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876 became the focus of my course. The World Wide Web has become a platform for reimagining spectacles of the past. The potential of the Centennial Exhibition as a source for engaging students in the study of nineteenth-century culture was noted on the occasion of the Bicentennial by Thomas J. Schlereth, a professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame (2). The Centennial project at Villanova took its cue from Schlereth’s writings and took advantage of the proximity of the exhibition site. The project also utilized sources from the exhibition, including its rich photographic record at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

The course was divided into two parts (3). During the first half of the semester, we read books about material culture and applied the various methods of analysis that we encountered in these books by analyzing artifacts on our campus. We used computers in this part of the course as tools for introducing the historical periods addressed in the readings. Before starting each book, we met in the computer lab for an exploratory exercise using the historical resources of the Internet to orient the students to various historical periods.

After spending the first half of the semester on methodology, we devoted the second half to the Centennial Exhibition, applying material culture methods and constructing a web site from the students’ work. The students’ research for the most part used traditional sources such as books and archival photographs; the web became the platform for presenting this research not only to their professor, but to the world.

Each student in the class completed a small-scale research project on some material aspect of the exhibition&emdash;one country’s exhibits, for example, or a particular building or artifact. The students turned these papers into individual web pages including text and, in most cases, images. These individual projects then served as source material for a second set of papers that strived to reach overall interpretations of the material culture of the Centennial. These analysis papers were conceived as introductory text for the web site and included links to various students’ research projects, thereby serving as a gateway into the site (4).

The key to this project was collaboration, in scholarship and in the construction of the web site. Collaborative web projects can communicate to our students the process of scholarship. They read what others have written, complete their own research to add to that body of knowledge, then arrive at interpretations that synthesize the new information with the old. They make connections between their work and the work of others. In the Centennial project, the students needed to see and understand everyone’s work in order to complete their own assignments successfully. As collaborating scholars, they also became cooperating partners in web construction. The students in this class had a wide range of knowledge of and comfort with computers. Often in the computer lab, the more experienced students volunteered to help others; the less experienced readily accepted coaching.

This collaboration using the web shifted the center of learning in my classroom. I gave a few lectures during the semester—an introduction to world’s fairs, for example, and lectures on the historical context of the world and the United States in the 1870s. However, the greatest historical insights of this course emerged from the students’ collaborative research. Many of the students in this class arrived at very sophisticated understandings of American nationalism at the time of the Centennial through their individual research and the findings of their classmates.

As a teacher, one of my challenges was to keep the students focused on their participation in a history course, not a computer course. To this end, class time in the computer lab focused on using computers to learn history, not just on using computers (5). To make sure everyone was acquainted with browsers and search engines, we used those tools to explore colonial American history. We browsed online exhibits, but we did so in order to produce critical reviews of the ways that artifacts were used in the interpretation of history. While we could not avoid having some classes devoted to the mechanics of constructing web pages, the ease of creating pages with software such as Netscape Composer and Microsoft FrontPage allowed us to focus more on the ways that the students were engaging with artifacts and text than on technical details. The students also were required to write their research papers first, then turn them into web exhibits, keeping their primary focus on the history rather than the technology.

Another challenge I faced as a teacher of material culture studies was trying to alter my students’ perceptions of the images they encountered on their computer screens. To me, and for the purposes of this course, these images represented artifacts. But for the students, they were “pictures.” Computer lab exercises that asked students to evaluate the screen images as artifacts helped to alter their perceptions a bit. However, this is a key dilemma of material culture studies on the web&emdash;the artifacts exist as both three-dimensional objects and as two-dimensional pictures. Students are accustomed to making this leap without a second thought. It is, after all, the leap that we make whenever we watch television or go to the movies. However, material culture scholars depend on observation of characteristics such as size, depth, and texture (6). To see only the two-dimensional picture poses serious limitations for the analysis of artifacts as historical sources.

The Centennial Exhibition site produced by the students at Villanova is evidence of the ways in which computers are transforming the teaching and learning of history. Given free reign with the enormous variety of graphics, text, and sound that the World Wide Web can support, a spectacle of the past can become something entirely different on the Internet. Web site creators are giving us their views of the past, but also a record of perceptions of these spectacles as they are remembered at the end of the twentieth century. I found it interesting in our project that the students often used the technology of the web to add visual excitement to the artifacts that served as source material for their projects. While the research is solidly grounded in the photographs and illustrations that survive from the Centennial, the representations of these artifacts on our site are often elaborated with colorful backgrounds and animated graphics that students found on the web. These ornamentations are, in part, a reflection of the students’ fascination with the new medium and their twentieth-century multimedia tastes. However, we know that the Centennial Exhibition was a colorful, eye-catching spectacle that is not fully conveyed through black and white photographs and line drawings. So while the graphics of the web place a twentieth-century frame around a nineteenth-century spectacle, they also project some of the visual excitement felt by visitors to the fair.

In the end, just one student out of twenty-eight complained about the technology orientation of the course. Most who were reluctant computer-users came to appreciate the ways that the technology could enhance their learning. One of the initially skeptical students was Kathleen Cohrs, who became one of the students who helped present our findings at professional conferences the semester after the project. At a meeting of the American Association for History and Computing in Philadelphia, she had this to say:

The interpretations of the Centennial that we have compiled on the Internet provide new insight into how history can be brought together to create a story. Every Web site is a story. Our Web site is not just a story about the Centennial Exhibition—it is a story of a generation of young adults and their perspectives on certain historical events. This is a story that will probably never be found on a library bookshelf. It will only be found on the Internet. . . . Without the Internet, the hard work that was performed throughout this semester would most likely be put in a desk only to be appreciated by our teacher and fellow students—and that would just be a complete shame.

This class has changed my perspective on studying history forever. . . . I no longer let a particular object slip through my field of vision. Instead, I notice little details about artifacts, and then I begin to think about the history of the artifact. . . . The study of material culture has opened up a new world for me concerning historical analysis. It is definitely a key perspective that I think everyone should consider when they are studying a historical object or event. Through studying this course and its various components, I have come to believe that the Internet is also a necessary tool of education. It has opened up a new world of information, just as the study of material culture has done. Another door has been opened to the world of history—an important door that could possibly bring new findings about the past that could prove very useful for the future.

Just as combining technology and material culture studies changed my students’ learning, integrating computer technology into the course changed my teaching. I became less often a lecturer and more often a partner with my students as we engaged in this adventure together. I became more conscious of the implications of the web for my own field of research. And I became more aware that with the Internet, the keys to knowledge are no longer kept in the professors’ pockets, but belong to everyone with the motivation to use them.

1. David Silver, “Interfacing American Culture: The Perils and Potentials of Virtual Exhibitions,” American Quarterly (December 1997): 825-50.

2. Thomas J. Schlereth, “The Centennial of 1876,” in Artifacts and the American Past (Knoxville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1980), 130-42; and Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 3-5.

3. See course syllabus, Material Culture: <http://www.homepage.villanova.edu/charlene.mires/matcult.htm>.

4. The Centennial Exhibition of 1876: <http://www.history. villanova.edu/centennial/>.

5. For instruction on developing these exercises, I am grateful for my participation in the Teaching With Technology faculty development workshop sponsored by the American Studies Association Crossroads Project, June 1999, Georgetown University, <http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/>, and for funding to attend this workshop from the Villanova Institute for Teaching and Learning (VITAL).

6. See, for example, Jules David Prown, “The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction?” in History From Things: Essays in Material Culture, ed. Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 1-19.

Charlene Mires is an assistant professor of history at Villanova University, where she teaches courses in U.S. history, the history of Philadelphia, and material culture studies. She is a faculty participant in the Independence Park Institute summer teachers’ workshop and is a recent recipient of the G. Wesley Johnson Prize for outstanding article published in the Public Historian, the journal of the National Council on Public History.