Textbooks and Teaching

Using Historical Landscape to Stimulate
Historical Imagination:
A Memoir of Climbing outside the Box

James P. Whittenburg

When I began teaching early American history at the College of William and Mary a quarter century ago, the new social history was running at flood tide. It shaped my personal vision of the past and dominated my syllabi. 1 But if the content of the courses was new, the approach I took with students remained traditional: read, write, and (via some infamous quantitative class projects) count. The publication of Rhys Isaac's The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790, in 1982 convinced me that it would be possible to use surviving and re-created elements of the early American landscape in teaching, if only I could get students out of the classroom and into the field. 2 I immediately discovered that it was easier to contemplate teaching with historic sites than to do it. Colonial Williamsburg was almost at my doorstep, but merely marching up and down the Duke of Gloucester Street would require more time than the traditional class period allowed.	1
Students work on a Virginia Research Center for Archaeology (VRCA) salvage archaeology site in the 1980s. Photograph by James P. Whittenburg.
My initial solution was volunteerism. One of my first doctoral students at William and Mary, Carter Hudgins, now a history professor at Mary Washington College but then an archaeologist, introduced me to other archaeologists at the Virginia Research Center for Archaeology (VRCA). When the Virginia Institute of Marine Science decided to build Waterman's Hall in 1983–1984, the VRCA needed willing hands to excavate the site of Gloucestertown, a seventeenth-century village on the York River. 3 I recruited college students for that work. Many other salvage excavations followed, and for the next half dozen years archaeology would be my standard means to introduce students to material culture and to get them onto historic sites. Eventually, changes at the VRCA and in my own life dictated that I put archaeology aside. Trowel-less, I began to experiment with courses in which visits to historic places were the principal activity. When my department needed an additional freshman seminar for the fall of 1997, I volunteered, with the proviso that we schedule "The Colonial and Revolutionary Tidewater" on Saturdays.	. . .