I'm Laurel Ulrich, and I'm delighted to welcome you to Tangible Things.

In order recover aspects of the past, historians

rely on things that were left behind-- letters, and diaries,
and court records.
But this course is going to focus on material objects--
artworks, ethnographic artifacts, scientific specimens, tools,
everyday things.
How did I come up with this strange way of working through history
and recovering history through objects?
It happened as I was trying to write about the history
of early American women.
Although I could go quite a ways by using written documents that
had been left behind, very few of those documents
had actually been created by the women themselves.
Gradually, I turned toward material objects,
what historians like to call material culture.
One thing led to another thing until I was totally
absorbed with writing history through tangible things.
This course builds on an exhibit and a general education course
that I helped to create at Harvard in 2011.
Now I have some collaborators who've helped me in this project.
Sara Schechner is a historian of science who
is curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific
Instruments at Harvard.
Ivan Gaskell, my longtime co-teacher, was for many years
a curator in the art museums at Harvard University.
He is now a professor at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.
Sarah Carter is a graduate of Harvard College
and also has a PhD in American studies from Harvard.
She has taught here in the history and literature program
and is now a curator at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee.
And Sarah and I have organized this online course.
And Ivan and Sarah Schechner have graciously also participated.
We want you to feel some of the excitement
that we feel about the fabulous things that
have been collected at Harvard over the centuries.
But the bigger and broader goal was to demonstrate
that close attention to material objects can be an entry point into history.
Harvard has many museums.
We have art museums.
We have museums of archaeology and anthropology.
We have a natural history museum that is subdivided
into separate museums for zoology, botany, geography, and mineralogy.
We have a collection of scientific instruments,
and the medical school has a museum of anatomy.
In addition, Harvard's many libraries also
have collections of tangible things.
The amazing materials in all these places are seldom seen together.
We're going to try to change that in this course.
We want you to think about the ways in which things
that seem to belong to different disciplines
actually can talk to one another.
We want to show you how close looking at even a single object
can push beyond academic and disciplinary boundaries.
Things that may seem unrelated to each other
can show relationships between art, and science, economics, and culture,
and between peoples in many different parts of the world.
We're going to push hard in this course to get
you thinking about tangible things, including
the things in your own environment, in new ways.