AU

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue. The strange death of Silas Deane : the problem of selecting evidence -- 1. Serving time in Virginia : the perspectives of evidence in social history -- 2. The visible and invisible worlds of Salem : studying crisis at the community level -- 3. Declaring independence : the strategies of documentary analysis -- 4. Material witness : hearth and home in the material culture of a market economy -- 5. Jackson's frontier, and Turner's : history and grand theory -- 6. The invisible pioneers : ecological transformations along the western frontier -- 7. The madness of John Brown : the uses of psychohistory -- 8. The view from the bottom rail : oral history and the freedpeople -- 9. The mirror with a memory : photographic evidence and the urban scene -- 10. USDA government inspected : the jungle of political history -- 11. Sacco and Vanzetti : the case of history versus law -- 12. Dust Bowl odyssey : the collective history of a migration -- 13. The decision to drop the bomb : the uses of models in history -- 14. From Rosie to Lucy : the mass media and images of women in the 1950s -- 15. Breaking into Watergate : plumbing a presidency through audiotapes -- 16. Where trouble comes : history and myth in the films of Vietnam -- 17. The body in question : culture and history in the shaping of gender identities.