Messages of Houses and Their Contents, 1780-1820

Review

Personal possessions help us interpret the past, and this lesson encourages students to think about the "stuff" that people owned in early America. Students examine photographs of reconstructed rooms, inventories of possessions, and house layouts from different time periods and are asked to make inferences about how changes in common household possessions reflect broader changes in society. The lesson is made up of four one-hour activities, any one of which can stand on its own. In the first activity students compare two household inventories that list an individual's possessions and their value. One set of inventories is presented as original documents which give students a flavor of the spelling and penmanship of the time. Students are also given typed transcribed versions of the texts for easier (though still challenging) reading. The second and third activities focus on visual analysis. Students examine a series of photographs comparing rooms decorated according to styles between 1775 and the 1830s and floor plans of two homes. These images are excellent sources of evidence for the changes in consumer goods, fashion and technology that occurred in the early nineteenth century. A fourth (and in our opinion optional) activity focuses on changes in household gardens. All four activities are structured around discussion of differences that students are encouraged to notice in the images and artifacts. For homework, students write paragraphs about what changes in personal items may reveal about the past.