Christopher Hendricks

Hendricks has done extensive work in craft demonstration (blacksmithing, tobacco processing, vegetable dyeing, timber framing, and gardening), historical archaeology, first-person character interpretation, and seventeenth and eighteenth-century dance performance. He finds that a mixture of approaches enlivens the classroom and speaks to non-traditional learners.

Dr. Hendricks uses more direct, hands-on approaches teaching early American history through field schools, taking students to a variety of different museums and historic sites to perform tasks like document historic structures through measured drawings (most recently crypts in Savannah’s Colonial Park Cemetery) or participate in archaeological excavations and restoration projects. For the latter, he taught students how to hew beams and cut joints to raise buildings. Such projects have helped interpret a wide range of early American sites including a slave cabin site at a Georgia plantation and an eighteenth-century garden in North Carolina.

Perhaps through his work with historic gardens, he developed a current research interest in early American foodways. His focus was the work of Mary Randolph and her classic cookbook, The Virginia Housewife. Studying the history of the cookery book as a form and the origins of southern cooking, he discovered new audiences interested in early recipes, cooking techniques, and other food traditions, and am finding myself literally educating the public about early America through their stomachs.

While he mostly works with more hands-on aspects of public history, he is involved in one extremely exciting digital history project, the Virtual Historic Savannah Project as a social history content supervisor. The site “documents the evolution of urban form by combining architectural and social history research with 3D computer and database technology.” Virtual Historic Savannah allows researchers to travel virtually through Savannah’s National Landmark Historic District at any year since its founding in 1733, seeing 3D models of extant structures, lists of building owners and occupants, and contemporary and historic photos of 2,200 buildings.