Picture the home (or homes) where you grew up. When was your neighborhood built? Did most people in your neighborhood own or rent their homes? What did your neighbors look like? Were there a lot of immigrants or your neighborhood? A visible transient population? Was there a lot of green space? What kind of businesses were around? Were their churches, synagogues, mosques, and/or other places of worship? What kinds of social services were available? Did you live near hospitals or government offices? Now, picture what that neighborhood must have been like nearly 100 years ago. For many people, the ethnic and religious makeup of their neighborhoods may have looked very different. Yet even the most diverse neighborhoods contain relics of the architectural, legal, and social actions that defined their demographics.

For the public scholars involved in the Mapping Inequality project, unveiling the financial, legal, and social structures in the creation of neighborhoods across the United States is a critical lens through which to study the history of American inequity. Mapping Inequality presents access to a national collection of “security” maps and area descriptions produced by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation between 1935 and 1940. These interactive maps are representations of real maps that HOLC created by gathering data from mortgage lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers to create color-coded maps of credit worthiness and risk in metropolitan neighborhoods. This practice of redlining—refusing loans or insurance to homeowners based on their ethnic and/or racial identity—was a defining factor in the racial and financial makeup of American cities. The urban ghettos of Chicago’s West and South Sides, New York’s Chinatown and Little Italy, the Jewish populations of the Boston area’s Brookline neighborhood, and Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles are all examples of the ways that redlining shaped cities across the United States. There are currently 150 cities represented on Mapping Inequality’s map, and the website is constantly being added to and expanded.

Mapping Inequality is a collaboration between three research teams: the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab; University of Maryland professor Richard Marciano from the Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC) at the College of Information Studies (“Maryland’s iSchool”) with a team of students; and Virginia Tech History professor LaDale Winling and a team of students. Information on the website is built upon materials collected by an earlier $250K IMLS-funded grant (LG-05-06-0158-06) called  T-RACES (Testbed for the Redlining Archives of California’s Exclusionary Spaces) with David Goldberg at UC Irvine and Chien-Yi Hou at UNC Chapel Hill; and a 2013 NSF/OCI Grant (0848296) called Cyberinfrastructure for Billions of Electronic Records (CI-BER), a cooperative agreement between NSF and NARA, with Cathy Davidson and Robert Calderbank at Duke. Additional website research and texts were created by N. D. B. Connolly, the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

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“Diacritics” is the term used for the accent marks that change the pronunciation and meanings of words in written in a variety of languages, including Vietnamese. DiaCRITICS is also a play on words to describe a group of writers, researchers, and artists engaged in public scholarship and criticism of culture produced in the Vietnamese diaspora. It is the official blog of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Its aim is to review and expose its audiences to the music, scholarship, literature, visual art, and performances of creators from the Vietnamese diaspora. Articles are published in English, Vietnamese, and French to reach the broadest audience and a diverse base of contributors. Popular media intermingle with academic scholarship, depicting the vast breadth of creative output of Vietnamese-diasporic cultures.

Pulitzer Prize-winning creative writer and University of Southern California Professor of English Viet Thanh Nguyen established diaCRITICS in 2010. At the beginning of 2018, Vietnamese-Danish-American author and musician Dao Strom took over as diaCRITICS’ Editor. Both its creator and new Editor are California-based, but contributors represent a vast array of global Vietnamese-diasporic communities. 

Image courtesy of Huy Cao

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How will the moment of time in which you live be remembered? Will Occupy Wall Street or the anti-Trump movement be written into history as the 1968 of the 21st century? Are our lives a turning point in the political, economic, or social conditions of the modern world?

For Rutgers University History Professors Jochen Hellbeck and Johanna Schoen, it is necessary to archive the political thoughts, emotions, and experiences of people living the current moment so that these questions can be answered at the most personal level—today and in the future. The American Pulse Project is a website that posts directives—questions about the current social and political climate—for people living in the United States in the 21st century, from all backgrounds, ages, and political viewpoints, to address based on their own thoughts and experiences. The idea is that the archive will take the “pulse” of the nation year by year and provide a plethora of narratives that capture what each moment was like.

Anyone living in the United States can participate in the American Pulse Project. The first directive was posted on November 24, 2017, and those who respond to it will be invited to continue answering these directives as they are produced. The website is sponsored by the School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University. The project is led by Jochen Hellbeck and Johanna Schoen in cooperation with Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Marion Bacher, and Marshall T. Poe.

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Do your great-great-great-grandparents remember where they were on the evening of April 14, 1865? Though this may not be a question most of us ask ourselves, it is one that might be answered by exploring the digital archives of the Remembering Lincoln project. The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln left a mark not only on the fabric of American history but on the memories of those who lived during this historic event. Much like the narratives that now define the tragedies like the John F. Kennedy’s assassination and September 11th, oral histories are integral to understanding the history of the Civil War, Antebellum America, and Abraham Lincoln’s legacy.

In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, Ford’s Theatre has been collecting and publishing archival materials pertaining to this historic event. Newspaper articles and personal letters from 1865–66 are juxtaposed with later historical narratives to present a complex resource for exploring the memory of Lincoln’s assassination. The project began in October 2013 with a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Ford’s Theatre worked with a variety of institutions, researchers, educators, and scholars to put together the digital archive. In addition to digitizing and publishing a searchable archive of materials related to Lincoln’s death, the Remembering Lincoln project provides resources for educators to teach with the materials.

http://rememberinglincoln.fords.org/

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Ajay Singh Chaudhary taught the first course of what would become the country-wide nonprofit interdisciplinary teaching and research institute, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, in New York City in 2012. This single course about Plato and Aristotle, initiated by a recent Columbia University Comparative Literature PhD, has grown into a national organization with active groups in Philadelphia and New Jersey and seeding schools across the midwestern United States. BISR offers rigorous, sliding-scale, four-week-long continuing education courses on a variety of topics to members of the communities where satellites of the Institute are located. Classes are taught by a combination of faculty members; some, like Chaudhary, have devoted their academic careers to the project, whereas others teach at BISR in addition to appointments at Hunter College, Columbia University, University of Denver, University of Cincinnati, and Manhattan College, amongst other institutions.

BISR takes its name from the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, the pre-WWII Germany research institute and free school associated with Marxist cultural theorists including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. This inspiration imbues BISR’s courses on subjects as diverse as Enlightenment Philosophy, Classics, Art History, History of Science, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Economics with a leftist ethos that presents education as something accessible and enjoyable for people of all ages, within and beyond the academy. Current and upcoming course titles include “Edward Said: Culture and Empire,” “Alternative Economies: Market Socialism,” “Critical Global Health,” and “Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah, Messianism, and History.” In addition to the Institute’s central courses, BISR runs courses under a Community Initiative, which pairs with New-York-based nonprofit organizations providing services for homeless, low-income, or formerly incarcerated New Yorkers to provide free humanities education for these underserved residents. BISR also teaches outside of organized classes by presenting faculty research for the general public through a blog called Tzeitung and the Podcast for Social Research.

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The history of slavery in Detroit was largely absent from public representations of the city’s history when Tiya Miles began the “Mapping Slavery in Detroit” website. As the Chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and Professor of History and Native American Studies at the University of Michigan, Miles collaborated with undergraduate and graduate student researchers to create a publicly-accessible informational website about the history of slavery in Detroit. The website includes a map of Detroit that highlights spaces where events related to slavery took place, a series of travelogue posts by Miles and her students about the experience of visiting these sites, and graphs and statistics compiled from archival research that present tangible data about the slave economy in Detroit in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The resources and narratives of “Mapping Slavery in Detroit” are presented to the general public, primary, and secondary school educators, and academic communities alike. They provide insight and pedagogical tools for curious audiences within and beyond the Detroit-area. The project continues to develop and expand, and much of it is chronicled in Miles’s most recent book, The Dawn of Detroit (2017), which is based on her collaborative research into the Detroit’s lesser-known history of slavery.

http://mappingdetroitslavery.com/

Image courtesy of: Mark F. McPherson. Looking for Lisette: in quest of an American original (Dexter: Mage Press, 2001).

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Dr. Alexandra Jones started the Washington, D.C.-based project Archaeology in the Community in 2006 to make the study of archaeology something that members of her community could engage with outside the bounds of traditional academia. While completing her PhD in Archaeology from the University of California at Berkeley, Jones worked with local schools to create archaeology curricula. When she returned to her home city of Washington, D.C., she found that many of the young students from her old neighborhood had never heard of archaeology—let alone met an archaeologist. Jones made it her mission to bring archaeology to her community in a way that could connect local students to their own histories and open up the possibilities of future careers in history and archaeology. Jones’s continues to work in academia in tandem to her work as a community leader as the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of AITC; she is an Assistant Professor at Baltimore Community College and Adjunct Professor at the University of Baltimore.

Archaeology in the Community became an official nonprofit organization in 2009. Since its inception, it has continued to facilitate educational programs, hands-on learning opportunities, and public community events that bring archaeology and history to students of all ages and backgrounds. Some of the programs organized by AITC include a Young Archaeologist Club, an Archaeology camp, a blog called “Digging into Archaeology,” an annual Day of Archaeology Festival, and public talks about history and archaeology.

Archaeology in the Community

Image courtesy of Archaeology in the Community.

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http://www.climatestoriesproject.org/

“Climate Stories Project” (CSP) is an educational and creative forum for discussing climate change and its effects on global communities. Its purpose is to collect oral histories about the experiential effects of climate change to establish curricula and workshops that introduce a personal approach to educating children, teenagers, adults, and teachers about the current state of the environment. It is led by Director Jason Davis, a musician and environmental educator; Project Manager Berenice Tompkins, an educator and community organizer; and Project Collaborator Stephen Siperstein, a climate change educator at Choate Rosemary Hall. “Climate Stories Project” uses oral history narratives about climate change to share the emotional impact of its effects and give resonance to people who may not connect to a more scientific vocabulary. These personal stories talk about everything from disastrous events like hurricanes and wildfires to the more subtle experiences of changing seasons and water levels to activism against the laws and businesses that perpetuate environmental degradation. CSP is brought to life by teachers, professors, and students who dedicate themselves to working with individuals affected by climate change, collecting their stories, and tying them together with research and workshops to incorporate the emotional and personal aspects of global climate change into a new climate change pedagogy.

One such project was led by Dr. Sara Beth Keough, Professor of Geography at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, who spent the 2016-2017 school year as a Fulbright Scholar in the country of Niger. She conducted research and taught in the West African Science Service Center for the Study of Climate Change and Energy at Niger’s national university, l’Université Abdou Moumouni. During her Fulbright fellowship, Keough collected the reflections of five West African students in her course “Communicating Climate Change.” These stories contributed the experiences of individuals from some of the poorest, most vulnerable populations in the world—perspectives that might be quite foreign to American students and educators grappling with teaching the effects of climate change. In addition to collecting these stories and conducting research, CSP works with educators to plan accessible curricula to teach workshops about climate change. The organization uses not only oral history narratives but music, poetry, and the visual arts to engage with diverse communities about climate change.

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This year, the Harvard University Division of Continuing Education, McLean Hospital and the Center for the History of Medicine, and the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine are presenting a series of four lectures about the history of psychiatry and medicine. The Colloquium offers the opportunity for practicing doctors, psychologists, historians, and the general public to explore historical perspectives on their fields and discuss current projects in the area as well as the possibilities of such perspectives in an informal atmosphere.

The first lecture in the series, “Freud, Reich, and Radical Politics: 1927-1933,” will be presented by retired Fairfield University professor Philip W. Bennett on September 14 at the Harvard Medical School. Future lectures will include “Going Crazy at Work: The History of Carbon Disulfide” and “From Attendants to Nurses: Philanthropy, Psychiatry and American Nursing 1940-1955.”

https://www.countway.harvard.edu/classes-events

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The Programming Historian publishes beginner-friendly tutorials that help humanists to learn a range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching. Contributors have uploaded web tutorials that will be useful to teachers and researchers in any field. For instance, “Intro to Google Maps and Google Earth” teaches how to create digital maps for publication in articles, books, and dissertations. “https://programminghistorian.org/lessons/preserving-your-research-data” suggests ways in which historians can archive and categorize their research data to ensure that it remains useful in the future. And “https://programminghistorian.org/lessons/editing-audio-with-audacity” helps researchers working with oral histories to load, record, edit, mix, and export audio files.

The Programming Historian maintains a blog that provides ideas for how scholars might use technology in their work and features exciting examples of real world applications of the website’s tutorials. UT-Austin History PhD alumnus Maria José Afanador-Llach, whose efforts to digitize endangered colonial archives in Colombia are featured here, has written several blog posts in Spanish about her experience working with the Fundación Histórica Neogranadina. Enhance your digital research and teaching skills by visiting the Programming Historian.

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