Fashion in American History

HIST 19 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Clothing is central to the history of the United States. European settlers arrived with new plants, animals, and ideas about civility, and colonial Americans imported textiles that helped them retain cultural ties to Great Britain. During the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington made decisions about their dress that would change the future of modern fashion. Advances in textile technologies turned the United States into a manufacturing nation. This course will cover the history of dress and textiles in the United States between the arrival of European settlers in the seventeenth century and the luxury and excess of the American Gilded Age at the end of the nineteenth century. 

Histories of “fashion” tend to center European ideas of taste and beauty, but people in what became the United States had their own unique relationships to clothing and style. In the first known course on fashion history ever offered through the history department at Harvard, we will encounter a range of sources (including paintings, extant garments, and personal correspondence) in order to explore relationships between fashion and art, sumptuary laws, international trade, environmental destruction, enslaved labor, and expressions of class, gender, and race. Sections will include research visits to Harvard museums and archives. For your final project, you will create a proposal for a museum exhibition that explores an aspect of American fashion using images, objects, and text-based sources to develop a historical research question and argument about how dress and textiles fashioned the nation.

Course Notes

This course meets the "North America" History Concentration requirement.