Wikipedia:Peer review/Shotgun house/archive1

Shotgun house

Still a bit rough around the edges, but I think nearly all of claims are referenced to reliable sources. It's still a work in progress but I think it's ready for a peer review. Sources on the topic are a bit scant for whatever reason (I guess people'd rather write about big fancy old houses than modest shotguns) but you can definently scare up some sources even with just Google scholar. If there's anything glaringly uncited, I will try to fix it. Thanks!--W.marsh 17:24, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I don't really like the Trivia section, or any Trivia seciton for that matter. Either rename it or find a way to incorporate it into the rest of the article. -Osbus 21:39, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hey this isn't FAC :-p but yeah I know it needs to go. --W.marsh 21:43, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I always thought that shotgun referred to the likelihood that a shot through the front door would hit everybody within, a tribute to the narrowness as well as to the lack of substantial construction in the interior walls. The ones in New Orleans look to be stick built instead of made from brick or rough timber, which that construction was replacing. There are brick shotguns, but I think they were a later innovation, and even then probably didn't need to have brick room dividing walls. This idea that a shotgun blast would pass through without striking anything sounds like some sort of watered down PC Yankee contrivance. A shotgun can be just 2 rooms deep, doesn't have to be 3, 4 or 5. Elvis was born in a 2-room shotgun. There are a lot of pre-stick-built two room houses in the south built on the hall-and-parlor plan, a dog-trot plan, or a double-pen plan. Agree with Osbus on the trivia comment --Paleorthid 22:40, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The shotgun-fires-straight-through theory is common in folklore, but all the sources I've found that had heard of Vlach's research accepted that it was at least plausable that the name was really of African origin. The article mentions the common shotgun theory though, right?

As for the materials, shotgun houses were originally built with wood exteriors mostly. As most are 100+ years old, the exterior has usually been redone to the point of unrecognizability, often more than once.

The trivia section is going, once someone either takes it out or rewrites it in prose. I think saying something about it's role in southern culture is important... but I haven't been able to rewrite it yet personally. --W.marsh 22:56, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]