A Case for Objects: Material Culture in the History Classroom

This module is part of the #AHRSyllabus project. More information about the project can be found on the AHR website under #AHRSyllabus. And visit the AHA’s Teaching Things site for Teaching Toolkits and an Object Library to use to teach with material culture.

Sarah Jones Weicksel

In this module, Sarah Jones Weicksel provides an easy-to-use method and set of activities for exploring history through objects. She shows how using material culture can promote a collaborative, inclusive space for students to craft historical questions and consider how people in the past interacted with and were shaped by their material environments. The module introduces an “object analysis worksheet” to help students create a biography of a single object and ask historical questions about the object. It also provides a lesson plan that interweaves an array of objects, images, and texts as sources through which students can analyze northern civilian encounters with the American Civil War. A classroom activity using everyday “found objects” concludes the module, offering a way to introduce students to doing history through material culture.

Read the module in full here.