History lies dead so long as it lies buried in books. Our task this semester is to bring the past back to life by focusing attention on any strange objects and peculiar facts you encounter in the course of your research.

Throughout the semester, I’d like you to post curious and interesting things that you encounter in the course of your research. I’m especially interested in “fragments of the past”—images, video clips, music, statistics, and anything else that helps the era come alive for you. You can also post interesting ideas from secondary sources. But the main emphasis in each posting should be on the primary source you’re presenting. Extra points for fragments that challenge our preconceptions about the era. And points deducted for anachronisms or incorrect information.

So whenever you come across a curious fact or object from the era, please share your finding with your classmates by adding it in a comment under one of the following categories: “Politics and Policy,” “Identity and Protest,” or “Culture and Consumption” (each accessible in the pull-down “Fragments of the Past” menu just above).

Use your comment to give source information, helpful context, and to explain whether this fragment confirmed or challenged your understanding of the period.

Note that your Fragments need not be related to your research topic. But you should check to see if someone else has posted something similar, and if so you should post yours as a “reply” to their post, not as a new comment.

When you post fragments, be sure to provide source information sufficient to guide others back to where you got it. Ideally, you will have a quotable, authoritative source (a scholarly publication OR a newspaper or magazine from the era), though I’m sure sometimes you’ll have to settle for citing a Youtube clip or the like.

Finally, Beware Imitations! There’s a lot of stuff out there that looks cool and appears to be from the past, but was created recently to feed the image-hungry internet. For example, check out the image of a contented “Fifties Housewife” at right. Everything you dig up for this course should be historically appropriate: documents and photographs from the period, statistics from a reliable source, etc.