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 House: The Architecture of Plantation
Slavery (1993 University of North Carolina Press).

Thanks for any other ideas -

Alison Bell