I’m not going to lie, going into this I thought I was going to be falling asleep from boredom the entire time while someone yapped about artifacts, however I was quickly proven wrong.
The first thing I enjoyed was that we actually got to feel the artifacts for ourselves, instead of having someone just talk to us about the artifacts. There were old letters, declarations, books and papers that we got to actually look through and read for ourselves. It was kind of like solving a mystery to see what these artifacts were, without any sort of previous context.
While other students tended to move around and check out more than one artifact, I only ended up moving once, to check out what appeared to be a script of a play titled “The Night Before Judgement Day,” which was about Abraham and the Sodomites. It was written by Clellon Holmes. At first, I assumed that it was from colonial days, like when the 13 colonies were established. However, Professor Isbell reminded me that typewriters were from the 19th century, which was far from when the colonies were established. There was a handwritten section on the back of it, to which Professor Isbell and I assumed that it was the work of journalist Jack Kerouac. The writing was very rushed, with the handwriting being abysmal at best and words being crossed out. The subject also had nothing to do with the script on the front of the page, which definitely leaves speculation on the table as to how the two knew each other, and what Kerouac’s writing on the back of the page related to what was written on the front.
All this to say, this was an interesting class. I’d definitely like to go back and look at this further, it seems like I could even write about this. It’s a solid theory and I want to discuss this further in greater detail. Hell, this may even be something I end up doing in my free time.
