Project Showcase: “Closed for Business”

Posted on April 18, 2013 by editors

The 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 →

Embodying the archive (Part 2): Lineages, longings, migrations

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Julia Brock

From the opening reception of Migrating Archives, on current exhibition at the GLBT Historical Society. Courtesy of E.G. Crichton.

The second part of this art and public history conversation series features artist E.G. Crichton. In addition to being professor in the Art Department at UC Santa Cruz, Crichton is the first artist-in-residence for the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. Her work, since she began her tenure there, has intentionally pulled the archives into public and personal forums. In her first major project, LINEAGE: Matchmaking in the Archive, Crichton positioned herself as matchmaker, connecting living persons with a specific archival collection at GLBTHS. The living participants then authored original work based on their match with and connection to the dead. Crichton recently opened her newest exhibition, Migrating Archives, on February 1, which tells stories of LGBT lives from archival collections around the world. In her responses, Crichton reflects upon her work at the GLBTHS (and the extent to which it can serve as a model for other institutions), on the matchmaking process, and on introducing forgotten histories into public memory. The full transcript of the interview can be found here.

The first post in this two-part series, linking to an interview with the Atlanta based art/idea collective John Q, can be found here.

~ Julia Brock is Director of Interpretation for the Department of Museums, Archives, and Rare Books and is curator at the Museum of History and Holocaust Education, Kennesaw State University (near Atlanta, Georgia). She received her Ph.D. in Public History from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2012.

Embodying the archive (Part 1): Art practice, queer politics, public history

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Julia Brock

E.G. Crichton’s “Lineage: Matchmaking in the Archives” project connected living people with archival partners. Here, Elisa Parry with Pat Parker. Portrait by and courtesy of E.G. Crichton.

“All we have to open the past are our five senses. And memory.”

~ Louise Bourgeois

We public historians are increasing our fluency in languages. We are conversing with colleagues across the globe and across disciplines, we are ever dexterous in our work with new media, and we are constantly strengthening the ways we reach out to audiences, drawing from a language of engagement that has emerged since our field’s early days and that has blossomed in the last ten years. This emergent patois has meant more and different kinds of collaboration and models of practice, including institutional and individual partnerships with artists.

Alliances between public historians and artists are not new but are growing. Museums and archives have been inviting artists to reimagine their collections and broaden their public reach since at least the mid-1990s. As Laura Koloski argued in her recent case study of the artist-in-residency program at the American Philosophical Society Museum, there should be a development of shared language between collaborators concurrent with the rise in artist/historian partnerships.[1] In working with artists, we might begin to articulate a contemporary aesthetic of historical knowledge. How do we (and audiences) make sense of and draw conclusions about the past when it is represented in contemporary art practice or embodied by artistic performance? Continue reading →

Project Showcase: The Health/PAC Digital Archive

Posted on March 28, 2013 by editors

The 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.

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

New uses for old interviews

Posted on February 13, 2013 by David Rotenstein

Left to right: Roger Gregory, Eric King, Tom Robinson, Joel (J.T. Speed) Murphy at the bar at Blind Willies. October 24, 1990. (Photo: David S. Rotenstein)

Can you remember where you worked during graduate school? To pay my way through Penn in the 1980s and 1990s I worked in cultural resource management and as a freelance writer. Although history and material culture are my true professional loves, the writing gig was the more interesting, though less profitable, job.

During a two-year break from classes–it’s a long story–I began writing a blues column for a short-lived Atlanta alt-weekly called Footnotes. Between August 1990 and March 1991, I wrote performance reviews and feature stories about musicians derived from lengthy tape-recorded interviews. I also interviewed bar owners and others to develop background material for future stories.

By the time I decided to return to Penn to finish my coursework, Footnotes had folded and I had begun writing about folk and blues music for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Charlotte Observer, and other papers and magazines throughout the United States. Always the historian, I held onto my research files and interviews, including verbatim transcripts for many of them. Continue reading →

Project Showcase: Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey Online

Posted on January 30, 2013 by editors

The 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: Exploring the Medical Heritage Library

Posted on January 2, 2013 by Jessica Ondusko

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 →

Oral histories of the land: Creating community dialogues on the environment

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Will Walker

Doing public programs is never easy, but it is the most immediate and rewarding way to engage directly with your audience. This past semester, the Cooperstown Graduate Program’s oral history project experimented with a new type of public program. Taking our cue from the statewide “Community Conversations” sponsored by the New York Council for the Humanities, which also provided funding for our project, we decided to use our large archive of oral histories as the basis for a series of dialogues about important environmental topics. Continue reading →

Serving two masters: Questions of audience at the Joseph Smith Documentary Editing Project (Part 3)

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Matthew Godfrey

Joseph Smith

Historians working on the Joseph Smith Papers have to navigate a balancing act between our various audiences—much like those who do contract history work. For the most part, the project has succeeded in its attempts to be balanced. In a review of the first volume of the Journals series in the journal Documentary Editing, Kenneth Minkema, executive editor of the Works of Jonathan Edwards, declared, “Readers need not raise a skeptical eyebrow when they see this edition is produced by LDS members and printed by an LDS press.” He continued, “There is an impartiality and professionalism here in the tone, subjects, and sources that bode well for this series and edition as a reliable resource for all.”[1] Other reviewers agreed. “This book is a significant improvement in [the] historiography of Joseph Smith,” Michael Marquardt, who, at times, has been critical of the church’s history endeavors, stated. “This is a scholarly work but simple enough for a general audience.”[2]

Yet maintaining a neutral tone and not shying away from controversial topics does not always appeal to church members who purchase the product. Continue reading →

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Tag Archives: archives

Project Showcase: “Closed for Business”

New uses for old interviews

Project Showcase: Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey Online

Project Showcase: Exploring the Medical Heritage Library

Serving two masters: Questions of audience at the Joseph Smith Documentary Editing Project (Part 3)