MY AMERICAN STUDIES

Theories and Methods in American Studies

• Does the 50s comic strip Pogo relate to the American Dream? You'll find that I couldn't answer the question. I couldn't even finish the paper. Still, I wrestled with this project more than any other in college, so I'm attached to the Pogo pages. (Plus, this is where I got my feet wet with HTML.)

Approaches to American Culture, 1607-1865

• Some maps...
• The Secret Diaries of William Byrd
• Sample data from the United States Historical Data Census Browser -- specifically, the "total number of free colored" persons in 1840. This data is eye-catching because it illustrates that slavery wasn't exclusively regionalized. In other words, in 1840 some African-Americans were free in the South and others were enslaved in the North, counter-intuitively.
• A virtual tour of Fraunces Tavern Museum
• "American Liberalism" and Other Scholarly Jams: The Liberal Tradition in America versus Chants Democratic
• On the uses of the internet...
• Whitney Watching the Cotton Gin, an iconographic analysis of a wood engraving, and its significance for slavery and the industrial revolution.