Students Study ‘Tangible Things’

Doritos and corn chips turned into objects of historical study yesterday in the new General Education course United States in the World 30: “Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History.”

After teaching fellows distributed chips to the roughly 300 students in the audience, history professor Laurel T. Ulrich and senior lecturer Ivan Gaskell, who co-teach the course, instructed students to write down observations about the chips they held in their hands.

“It’s not about being clever about things,” Gaskell said to the students. “It’s just observing it.”

Five minutes later, students raised their hands to share their observations, which ranged from “bumpy, three millimeters thick, and heterogeneous” to “coarse with black spots.”

Gaskell said this and other exercises, including a scavenger hunt through Harvard’s museums, reflect the course’s goal of introducing students to object-based history, which is the study of history through the observation of artifacts.

“These things encourage students to look carefully, to observe, to see something with as fresh [of] eyes as they can, something that most students will have put in their mouths a hundred times or more, and yet not necessarily thought about,” he said.

The course was developed to offer students a broader way of studying history, Gaskell added.

“Historians learn how to read texts and bring a sophisticated eye to that, but [students] don’t learn how to use these other traces of the past,” he said.

The course is closely connected with an exhibit that shares its name with that of the course. The exhibit is located in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments in the Science Center.

The course has also placed historical artifacts related to the course in seven different collections around campus.

Gaskell said he thinks the installations are on an unprecedented scale for an undergraduate course.

“Of course there have been projects and exhibitions in which collections lend to each other, but not to the extent that we have done,” he said.

Ulrich, one of 23 professors to have received the distinctive University professorship, said she hopes the connection between the course and the exhibits will encourage students to explore Harvard’s museums.

“I don’t want anybody to graduate without having discovered these resources,” she said. “And nobody will get through this course without discovering those museums.”

Alan Silva ’13, a student in the course, echoed Ulrich’s sentiment.

“The class really emphasizes how lucky we are to have all these wonderful things in our collections,” he said.

However, one senior, who requested anonymity to avoid jeopardizing her grade, said she was disappointed by the class.

“It’s not what I expected,” she said. “I expected it to be more related to Harvard’s collections and the general history behind them.”

Gaskell said he was not surprised by mixed student reaction to the course.

“I think there’s a certain strand of bewilderment to studying objects in this way,” he said.

—Staff writer Rebecca D. Robbins can be reached at rrobbins@college.harvard.edu.