American Studies 335

New England

Roger Williams University

GHH 109

M, Th  3:30 - 4:50

Spring Semester, 2010

Michael R. H. Swanson, Ph. D.

Office:  GHH 215

Hours: M, W, F  1:00-2:00

T, 9:00 - 10:00 or by appointment

Phone:  254 3230

E-mail:  amst335@gmail.com

Index

Spring is officially here!  Expect a Blizzard Shortly

For Monday, March 22

No New Readings.  Welcome back..  I hope your spring break was all that you hoped it would be.

Knowing that it will take a couple of days for people to get their feet back under themselves, I'm going to show a Video today.  We're going to watch the first part of the PBS video from The American Experience series, A Midwife's Tale.  Based on a diary of a Hallowell, Maine, midwife, the film is extraordinary, not only for the story, but for the way it captures the essence of village life in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  You should understaned the psychodynamics of living in a dispersed village better after watching this film.  Try to pay as much attention to the physical background as you can. The transcript can be read by clicking on the image below.

Martha Ballard's diary,  which inspired the book and film is available in its entirety at DoHistory.  Clicking on the picture to the right will bring you there.

Read, In The New England Village,

Chapter 3: The Architectural Landscape, pp. 71-87

In this chapter, Wood questions whether our picture of 18th century domestic architecture is accurate. If not, what did the average 18th century house look like?  As one might expect, wealth and length of community settlement determines the answer. I don't expect you to master all the technical statistics in this chapter, so don't let them overwhelm you. Do concentrate on the descriptive data on the range of house size and house value (pp. 74-78).

• Illustration 3.8 (p. 84) is less confusing than it looks at first. The size of the circles indicates the number of houses in the towns surveyed. Black areas represent two story houses and white areas one-story houses.
  

The Hooper house to the right is an eighteenth century gentleman's house.  Most of the houses in its vicinity would have been far less substantial and elegant.  Houses of this quality generally have survived in towns which, for reasons we'll come to understand later, experienced long periods of economic stagnation.  Bristol was such a town, which explains why so much of its early architecture survives.  Click on the photo to see more examples of 18th century New England architecture.

As one might expect, the number of surviving 17th and 18th century houses is fairly small, and biased towards the houses of the wealthiest and most substantial citizens.  In many places they have disappeared entirely under the pressures of redevelopment. The Eleazar Arnold House (left)  is a famous example of a 17th Rhode Island century house.   This certainly would have been the finest house in its vicinity at the time it was built, regardless of how medieval or "quaint" it looks.  Click on the picture for other examples of 17th century New England houses.

For Thursday, March 25

Linked to the button above is a  table of contents for our book of folk tales and legends.  I want our study of them to be "audience participation".  In other words, I want each of you to be responsible for presenting at least one of the story groups to the class.  This doesn't have to be anything very elaborate, read the poem or stories or paraphrase them (hand gestures encouraged but optional), and then spend a minute or so about what the tale suggests to you about New England.  Note that the list is grouped by heavy lines.  To get this started, I'm asking you to list your first, second, third, and fourth choices on a sheet of paper and turn it in This Class Period. 

Alternately, you can submit these choices by putting them in your blackboard notebook.  I'll sort these out as fast as possible.  We will enjoy these toward the end of the semester, but I want you make your choices early.

Hallowell, Maine, 1878  Click for a larger picture