ASH 3002y Class Notes
April 14, 1999

Jacksonian Architecture

Announcements:

• See the new Student members and their home pages page.
• See also Worlds Visible and Invisible: Whitman, New York, and the World/Whorled of Print in the 1850s. 
• Field trip?
• Questions about Project #3

Finishing up the Southwest:

• Texts/sites we've already discussed:
  • Jefferson and Turner (review)
  • Smith, Virgin Land:  The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950, 1978), chapters 11-15, pp. 123-173 (Barnard reserves).
  • Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her:  Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill and London:  U of North Carolina P, 1984), pp. 4-13.
    • See also Caroline Kirkland, A New Home--Who'll Follow? (1839) (excerpts in NA pp. 1051-1060; full text on reserve)
  • The Emigrants' Guide to California and Oregon
• Other sites and approaches:
• The Gold Rush at PBS Online 
• Walt Whitman, "Facing West from California's Shores," The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 5th edition, vol. 1, p. 2153.
• WestWeb:  Including a bibliography of sources on the West, "Making It Their Own:  Women in the West,"  "The Golden Mountain:   Asian-Americans in the West," "Tierra Nuestra:   Chicanos in the West," and "Many Bloodied Plains:   Western Military History"
• The Modesto Bee's Yosemite:   A History, Prologue and Chapters 1-2.
• "California as I Saw It": First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900
• Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910
• Sources for the Study of the Southwest
• PBS New Perspectives on the West

Back to "civilization"?

Compare and contrast Beecher and Greenough:

• Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), Preface and Chapters 1, 14, 25 (reserve)
• Horatio Greenough, "Remarks on American Art," "American Architecture," from Form and Function (c. 1852) (reserve)

Discussion of  Domestic Ideals:   1840-1870:

Consideration of other images:

• Professor Jeffrey Howe's Nineteenth-century American Architecture site
• Index of American Design:   Guided tours of drawings in the Index of American Design on the following topics: Costume, Dolls, Folk Arts of the Spanish Southwest, Furniture, Metalwork, Pennsylvania German Folk Art, Pottery, Shaker Crafts, Textiles, Toys, Woodcarving.
• Reed College's virtual museum of Nineteenth-century American Art and Architecture

Additional reading: 

• For background on Beecher, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher:  A Study in American Domesticity (1973; New York:  Norton, 1976).
• Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).