In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain explains the Yankee Hank Morgan's ability to reconstruct 19th-century technology in medieval England by making him a foreman at the Hartford Colt factory, a weapons plant that was in the vanguard of technology, not only for weaponry but for machine tools. This makes it plausible, at least on the surface, that he would have the know-how to make the equipment necessary to produce bicycles, six-shooters, telephones, and machine guns, among other things.
But since Twain himself lacked such know-how, he never explains in detail how Morgan accomplished any of this. This created a perfect opportunity for a class of engineering majors to combine the disciplines of engineering, chemistry, math, history, and literature. A group of twelve VMI freshmen did extensive research to determine whether Morgan could have had the material and means to create one commodity of 19th-century technology, the six-shooter (in fact, one of the simpler items Morgan introduces into Arthurian England). They concluded that he could have. Then, using their results, they planned the design and manufacture of a "medieval" pistol, the Morgan Special, and wrote about the process in the form of "lost diaries."
The class had to research both the history of the Middle Ages, specifically the indigenous materials and technology available, and the engineering principles behind the pistol itself and the machine tools needed to make it. In the process, they learned an enormous amount about both 19th-century America and medieval culture, European and Middle Eastern. They also performed various chemical experiments having to do with oil viscosity, metallurgy, and propulsion.
In the spirit of Twain's creative anachronisms, students were not be limited to the 6th century. Twain's book is ostensibly set in the 500's, but he really describes the Middle Ages of the 1200's through the 1400's, so they had the whole spread of medieval technology and materials to draw upon. Similarly, in the spirit of the History Department's globalization, they were not limited to medieval England. Hank Morgan could travel to the Middle East or Far East to obtain materials or skills, using his "fore-hindsight" to know what he had to get and where to get it.
The project lasted most of two semesters. The class began as a group cooperatively researching the materials and methods for manufacturing a revolver. Then they divided into four teams, each assigned to work on one aspect of the manufacturing process as Morgan would have had to adapt it to suit the materials and technology available in the Middle Ages. Finally, the teams wrote diary entries detailing Hank Morgan's progress as he endeavors to manufacture a modern revolver and fitting them into the chronology of the novel. In the process, they incorporated both technical description and narrative, reproducing as much as possible the "voice" of Hank Morgan, with references to characters, events, and themes actually in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.