Category Archives: Project Showcase

Project Showcase: Museum on the Move

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airstream trailer

This 1954 Airstream trailer is the home of UL Lafayette’s Museum on the Move. Photo: Museum on the Move.

Building upon our innovative approaches to teaching and practicing Public History, the History Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette is proud to announce an exceptional project called Museum on the Move. Public History students will outfit a vintage Airstream trailer (left) with an interpretive exhibit that will then hit the road to take history directly out of the classroom and to the public. Exhibits will be created on a rotating basis and require the melding of two courses and a cohort of students.

The first course will be a traditional history course where students conduct research projects geared toward the planned exhibit. The next phase of the project is for a Museum Studies course where students re-craft the research done in the first class to create exhibit components that they will install in the trailer. Once the exhibit is up and rolling, the trailer will be sent out on short runs to venues around the state where the students’ (and the program’s) work will be on display.

The first planned exhibit will be on Louisiana Women and it is being timed to coincide with the publication of Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 2 (University of Georgia Press) being edited by the department’s own Dr. Mary Farmer-Kaiser. Students currently enrolled in her course on Louisiana Women are pursuing their studies with an eye toward the future exhibit and are excited to be a part of something with such potential for hands-on success. In the end, it is our intent for the program to teach students the methods and value of creative approaches to practicing history and to establish a recognizable product in the form of rotating exhibit topics in a compelling package. The trailer has been purchased, the class is underway, and everything is coming together.

~ Bob Carriker, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Project Showcase: “Inside a Senate Investigation: Watergate 40 Years Later”

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senators voting

Senators Howard Baker (R-TN) and Sam Ervin (D-NC) cast votes during the Senate Watergate Committee hearings of 1973. Seated behind the senators is the committee deputy counsel Rufus Edmisten, whose oral history interview is included in the collection of the U.S. Senate Historical Office. (Photo courtesy Senate Historical Office.)

During the month of May 2013, on www.senate.gov, the U.S. Senate Historical Office looks back 40 years to one of the Senate’s most important investigations. The Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, more commonly known as the Watergate Committee, questioned the president’s closest advisors about the break-in and cover-up at the Watergate office complex and other “illegal and improper campaign practices” that occurred during the presidential campaign of 1972.

Hearings began in closed session on March 28, 1973, and then continued in open, televised sessions on May 17. Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina chaired the committee, with Tennessee’s Howard Baker serving as vice-chair, ably assisted by their majority and minority counsels, Sam Dash and Fred Thompson.

Under the guidance of Senators Ervin and Baker, and backed by bipartisan support of the Senate, the Watergate Committee produced much of the evidence that led to the August 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon. The Watergate Committee also established an important legislative legacy.

As the Watergate Committee continued its work, the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration prepared for an anticipated impeachment trial. Assisted by long-time Senate parliamentarian Floyd Riddick, the Rules Committee held its own set of executive session hearings to lay the groundwork for a presidential impeachment trial.

Since its first inquiry in 1792, Congress has conducted hundreds of investigations, fulfilling a constitutional oversight responsibility while serving as the eyes and ears of the American public. During the Civil War, Congress created the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to oversee wartime activities of the Lincoln administration.  Throughout its history the Senate has investigated a wide array of issues, including organized crime, the defense industry, and Wall Street banking practices, revealing some of its most interesting stories and personalities, but few investigations have proved to be as consequential as Watergate. For further information, contact historian@sec.senate.gov.

~ Betty Koed, Associate Historian, United States Senate

2013 Lightning Talks

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London Works exhibit photoThere actually was a thunderstorm with lightning on Thursday night in Ottawa–it’s been an unsettled spring here, as in much of the northeast.  The lightning on Friday, though, came in the form of a set of quick presentations at the NCPH conference on recent and emerging digital public history projects.  This year’s “Lightning Talk” projects included:

Project Showcase: “Closed for Business”

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webpageThe Historical Society of Pennsylvania has launched “Closed for Business,” a new digital history project focused on the early years of the Great Depression and the December 1930 failure of a large Philadelphia bank, Bankers Trust Company.

The project was part of a larger effort funded by the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation to draw attention to the Society’s 20th-century collections and to build expertise in developing online interpretive projects that follow international Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards. Continue reading →

Project Showcase: The Health/PAC Digital Archive

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screen shot of websiteThe Health/PAC Digital Archive is a complete collection of the influential Health/PAC Bulletin, which was published for nearly three decades until Health/PAC closed in 1994. Full-text searchable, it amounts to a documentary history of mid- to late-20th Century American health policy and politics.

Health/PAC originated in 1967 when Robb Burlage, a co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), studied the New York City hospital affiliation agreements that gave administrative and financial control of the New York City public hospitals to private voluntary hospitals and academic medical centers. Along with journalist and activist Maxine Kenny, he developed a systematic critique of the city health system, focusing particularly on parasitic relations between medical schools and their environs; hierarchical and undemocratic health planning; and emerging neighborhood health movements to alter it.

newsletter Health/PAC staffers and authors wrote and spoke to health activists across the country on every issue from free clinics to women’s health struggles to health worker organizing to environmental justice. The organization both reported on what was going on (before there was an Internet) and debated strategies and tactics to build a more just health system. It coined the terms “medical empire” and “medical industrial complex” to capture the ways the profit motive distorted priorities in the American health care system. Even as broader political foment in the country died down by the mid-1970s, Health/PAC remained and published important pieces on women’s health, occupational/environmental health risks, incarceration, Medicare/Medicaid crises, and HIV/AIDS, among many other topics.

Students will all find these Bulletins a source of useful analysis and information. This is not only a way to learn about late 20th century health history, but to consider why certain issues continue to plague our health system.

~ The Health/PAC Archives Workgroup: Merlin Chowkwanyun, Feygele Jacobs, Ronda Kotelchuck, Susan Reverby, David Rosner, Oli Fein and Robb Burlage

Project Showcase: Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey Online

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typed index cardThe Newberry Library’s Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture is pleased to announce the release of a new historical web resource, the Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey, a collection of translations of approximately 50,000 newspaper articles originally published in Chicago’s ethnic press between the 1860s and the 1930s. The articles from 22 ethnic groups were originally translated during the 1930s as a project of the U.S. Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA).

The 1930s project intended to offer English-speaking researchers and students access to primary materials on ethnicity and urban life in one of America’s great polyglot cities during a formative span of its history. In subsequent decades the Survey has been invaluable to scholars and students of Chicago history, and it has been used effectively in high school and college classrooms.

The new digital collection, made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, provides broader and better organized access than has been possible with paper and microfilm. The Survey translations have considerable value for teaching and research in immigration studies, urban and local history, modernist and comparative literary studies, the history of popular culture, and many other fields. They can reward browsing for curiosity as well as targeted research.

Please direct all inquiries to the Newberry’s Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture, scholl@newberry.org.

~ Anne Flannery, Assistant Director of Digital Initiatives and Services, Newberry Library

Image:  WPA index card with typed translation of undated Chicago Tribune article on “Our Polish Citizens.”

Project Showcase: Vermont Marble Museum and the Preservation Trust of Vermont

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vermont marble museum

The Vermont Marble Museum in Proctor, Vermont

Located in Proctor, Vermont, The Vermont Marble Museum tells the story of the Vermont Marble Company — once the largest marble company in the world.  Prominent buildings and monuments all over the United States and the world were made by the Vermont Marble Company including the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, the US Supreme Court Building and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

In the spring of 2012, after many years of operations, the current owners decided to close the Museum and sell the collection. The Preservation Trust stepped in, hoping to raise enough money to purchase the entire operation with the ultimate goal of keeping the collection intact and finding a new non-profit owner to run the museum in its current location in Proctor.

As of December 31, 2012, the Preservation Trust had successfully raised $250,000 to complete Phase I of the project, taking a significant step forward on the path to saving this irreplaceable piece of our heritage. This phase includes the acquisition of the museum collection and displays, including the 2000+ rare glass plate negative collection, and the gift shop.

The Preservation Trust is now beginning Phase II which includes raising $480,000 for the acquisition of the museum building. Additionally, we are actively seeking a new non-profit owner and operator for the museum.

For more information, please visit the Preservation Trust of Vermont website or contact Paul Bruhn at the Preservation Trust of Vermont: (802) 343-0595 or paul@ptvermont.org.

~ Paul Bruhn
Executive Director
Preservation Trust of Vermont

Project Showcase: Exploring the Medical Heritage Library

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Good's family flora

Illustration of a medicinal plant from Good’s Family Flora (http://archive.org/details/61631010RX1.nlm.nih.gov)

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is a virtual gateway to tens of thousands of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals and films contributed by several of the world’s leading medical libraries.  Open access to these materials through the Internet Archive enables scholars and the general public alike to explore the “interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen understanding of the world in which we live.”

The Medical Heritage Library was established in 2010 by the Open Knowledge Commons through an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant.  New content is added to the repository daily as digitized materials are completed.  Items from the collection, which spans the past six centuries, are highlighted on the MHL’s home, Facebook and Twitter pages. Continue reading →