Robert Madison Shearman, Jr.

Greets! You're currently visiting my class account for AMST205 at the University of Maryland. Mostly what you'll find here is for the class. Most all of my personal information can be found by connecting to my WAM address (that is, the homepage located there)... http://www.wam.umd.edu/~madison.

Material Aspects of American Life, as taught by Dr. Virginia Jenkins and Psyche Williams, is a course which starts as a tutorial on Material Analysis -- deriving cultural inferences from physical artifacts. From there we went into a study of American life in the Depression and New Deal Era (between the stock market crash of 1929 and the United States' entry into World War II in 1941). The culminaton of the course was an in-depth study of the community of Greenbelt, Maryland, which was a New Deal housing project in the late 1930's, based on materials analysis. Our classwork contributed to an ongoing project known as Virtual Greenbelt, an online version of the Greenbelt Museum.

Class-related materials are found below. Assignments (pages created by the course instructors) are on the left. My coursework is on the right (accessed by clicking on the assignment title).