Instructions for the Build-Your-America Kit (The final project for my Constructing America course)

You're going to assemble your own kit. Sources include everything ever done, said, written or made that seems to you in some meaningful sense American. You'll need a problem to work on, a collection of sources that offer possible solutions, and finally you'll propose a solution to your problem through a work of your own that draws on your sources and also includes your own best shot at an answer.

1. A persistent grudge or great hope to guide you. As you go through a day or leaf through a newspaper, what bothers you? What do you characteristically rant about or dream and plan about? Work on that.

2. Your own anthology of texts and test cases.

Once you begin to have a sense of what your area might be, begin to look around and see what has been tried before. If you're interested in American experiments in communal living, you might want to read about the Quakers, the Oneida Community, child-rearing customs among the Plains Indians, etc. If you're interested in vernacular architecture you might want to read about barn raisings, or Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater House, or the connections between Navajo adobe dwellings and modern passive solar rammed-earth houses. If you're interested in American forms of feminism you might be interested in reading about Puritan female healers, Mormon female priests, and the Seneca Falls Declaration. If you're interested in American health care, I really have no idea, but the school and the city are full of people who know stuff.

So many more things have been attempted on this continent than one could be aware of. Before you conclude that American music is only rock and country, check out shape note singing, the hammer dulcimer, and Ogalala chant. Become an expert on things in your chosen area that no one has ever heard of. Begin to gather a shelf of books, clippings, web links, diagrams, artifacts, recordings--whatever seems helpful. Begin to keep notes about what possibilities they suggest. These are your working materials. We'll ask to see them so we can talk with you about them.

3. Now make something that seems like a sort of answer to your problem or question or hope. What we will want you to present will certainly need to include historically grounded writing of your own, but might also include other sorts of work if it seems demonstrably connected to your research. We will want an essay but we might also be sold on the need for making songs, a barn, a health care plan, etc.

You'll have lots of opportunities to try out parts of your thinking with people in the class. For now, just dig in and start gathering and thinking.