Alison,

I would add Kenneth Feder, A Village of Outcasts (Mayfield, 1994) and Russell Barber, Doing Historical Archaeology (Prentice-Hall, 1994) which work well for teaching arch and hist methods as well as historical interpretation of American material culture.

Of course it is up to you, but the compilation of these histarch generated reading and teaching lists in earlier threads was a very helpful exercise

>>> [log in to unmask] 04/06/02 17:05 PM >>>
This fall I'll be teaching a course called "The Anthropology of American
History," and I'm looking for suggestions to complete my reading list.

The course is designed to show students how it is possible - through
archaeology, architectural history, the study of documents and other means -
to address issues about historic communities that ethnographers often
investigate among living groups, including cultural values, social structures,
and gender roles.

I'd like to use reader-friendly, humanistically oriented studies focusing on a
range of peoples, places and times. I'd especially appreciate recommendations
for studies of nineteenth-century communities, of non-European people in the
U.S., and of places other than the east coast (missions? mining towns?).

Thus far I'm considering:

James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love,
and Death in Plymouth Colony (2000 W.H. Freeman).
Leland Ferguson, Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America,
1650-1800 (1992 Smithsonian Institution Press).
Darrett Rutman and Anita Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia
1650-1750 (1984 W.W. Norton).
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on
her Diary,1785-1812 (1990 Vintage Books).
John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big Hous: The Architecture of Plantation
Slavery (1993 University of North Carolina Press).

Thanks for any other ideas -

Alison Bell