Our Projects on Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

The Denig Manuscript

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:37:52 +0000

The Denig Manuscript

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media partnered with the Winterthur Museum to create a multimedia digital project that brings to life the manuscript of Ludwig Denig. Written in the 1780’s, the leather-bound manuscript was frail and brittle. In an effort not only to preserve the manuscript but also expose its unique content to a wider audience, the illuminated manuscript was created. Through this project, viewers can explore the watercolor paintings, devotional texts, and hymns.

Antisemitism, U.S.A.

Thu, 09 May 2024 16:56:09 +0000

Antisemitism, U.S.A.: A History

Antisemitism has deep roots in American history. Yet in the United States, we often talk about it as if it were something new. We’re shocked when events happen like the Tree of Life Shootings in Pittsburgh or the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, but also surprised. We ask, “Where did this come from?” as if it came out of nowhere. But antisemitism in the United States has a history. A long, complicated history. A history easy to overlook. Join us on Antisemitism, U.S.A.: A History, a limited podcast series hosted by Mark Oppenheimer, to learn just how deep those roots go. Antisemitism, U.S.A.: A History is written by John Turner and Lincoln Mullen. Britt Tevis is the lead scholar. The series is executive produced by Jeanette Patrick and produced by Jim Ambuske. Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Harlem in Disorder

Thu, 09 May 2024 16:35:26 +0000

Harlem in Disorder

Harlem in Disorder by Stephen Robertson examines the violence that spread across Harlem on the night of March 19, 1935, the first large-scale racial disorder in the United States in more than a decade and the first occurrence in the nation’s leading black neighborhood. Through a granular analysis of those events and the mapping of their locations, Harlem in Disorder reveals that Harlem’s residents participated in a complex new mix of violence that was a multifaceted challenge to white economic and political power. Tracing the legal and government investigations that followed, this project highlights how that violence came to be distorted, diminished, and marginalized by the concern of white authorities to maintain the racial order, and by the unwillingness of Harlem’s Black leaders and their white allies to embrace fully such direct forms of protest. Focused on capturing rather than simplifying the complexity of the new form of racial violence, Harlem in Disorder is a multilayered, hyperlinked narrative that connects different scales of analysis: individual events, aggregated patterns, and a chronological narrative. Its structure foregrounds individual events to counter how data can dehumanize the past, and to make transparent the interpretations involved in the creation of data from uncertain and ambiguous sources.

America's Public Bible

Thu, 09 May 2024 16:20:27 +0000

America’s Public Bible

America’s Public Bible by Lincoln Mullen is an interactive scholarly work that uncovers the history of the Bible in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Using computational methods, this project has found biblical quotations in two large corpora of historical American newspapers. By identifying, visualizing, and studying quotations in American newspapers, the site offers a commentary on how the Bible was used in public life over one century of American history.

History and Culture Access Consortium

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 17:44:26 +0000

History and Culture Access Consortium

The HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium (HCAC) is an initiative to digitize, preserve, and make visible the rich historical collections at HBCU archives and museums. This project was launched by The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC) and The Smithsonian Office of Strategic Partnerships in March 2021 to as part of The Smithsonian’s commitment to sustainable HBCU cultural institutions and to preserve and interpret African American art, history, culture, and memory. RRCHNM manages the project operations and strategy for the project as well as provides training to HBCU project partners in digitization, metadata creation, digital exhibition, public history oriented writing, and digital humanities training in Omeka S and other digital tools. Currently, we are in the pilot phase of the project working with five HBCUs - Clark Atlanta University Museum (Georgia), The Florida A&M University’s Meek-Eaton Archives and Museum (Florida), Jackson State University’s Margaret Walker Center (Mississippi), Texas Southern University Museum (Texas), and Tuskegee University Archives (Alabama). The final output for this project includes a digital public history website that highlights collections from these archives and museums that will launch in the Summer of 2025.

Connecting Threads

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 17:02:37 +0000

Connecting Threads

Connecting Threads is a born-digital interdisciplinary humanities project that explores the influence of under-represented actors in global fashion history. The project investigates the consumption of Indian and Indian-imitation fabrics by communities of the global south, amplifying the impacts of Indian producers and global south consumers on international networks of design, trade, and taste. The project, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities, brings together original research on extant checked cottons in museum collections with contemporaneous images and related archives documenting their production and use as fashion articles in the global south. By connecting these objects, or ’threads,’ the platform will serve as a gateway to more and deeper explorations of the impact of south-to-south fashion networks on global history. This project, currently in its first phase, is a collaboration between scholars and curators at RRCHNM, University of Edinburgh, Victoria & Albert Museum, The Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and the University of Glasgow Archives.

Worlds Turned Upside Down

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:14:49 +0000

Worlds Turned Upside Down

Worlds Turned Upside Down tells the story of the American Revolution as a transatlantic crisis and imperial civil war through the lives of people who experienced it. For many modern citizens of the United States, “the cause of America” that gave birth to a new nation in 1776 and the heroic stories we tell ourselves about its founding remains “in great measure the cause of all mankind.” But for the people who lived through it, the revolutionary era upended their lives in ways they could have never imagined. The crisis that engulfed the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century inspired British Americans, Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans and African Americans, Europeans, and other peoples to question their loyalties, challenge authority, seek freedom, and resist revolutionary change.

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 14:59:22 +0000

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is a podcast that showcases 18th and early 19th-century women’s letters that don’t always make it into the history books. Join historian Kathryn Gehred and her guests as they explore the lives of women and the world around them through their letters.

Hearing the Americas

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 15:49:11 +0000

Hearing the Americas

Hearing the Americas explores the early decades of the recording industry (1898-1925), posing new questions about the origins of popular music. Revealing how ideas about genre, race, and nation were formed in the transnational circulation of people and records, Hearing the Americas focuses on the United States and Latin America, whose vibrant musical interactions originated in the African diaspora and were reactivated in new ways by the advent of the record industry. Hearing the Americas hopes to overcome the barriers of time and technology to make this music easier to hear, appreciate, and understand. Rather than simply using music as a decorative evocation of what the era “sounded like,” Hearing the Americas makes it easier to bring music into historical analysis for anyone interested in the history of music and the recording industry.

Legal Modernism

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 11:38:08 +0000

Legal Modernism

Law and legal practice modernized in the nineteenth-century United States. We are studying and visualizing the history of the modernization of American law. Using computational methods, we are tracing the migration of law, detecting citations across treatises and caselaw, and understanding at the macroscopic level how law became modern. In the nineteenth-century, oral pleadings and oracular judges gave way to published decisions and codified statutes. Local customs and agrarian rhythms were exchanged for nationally uniform creditor remedies in sync with fast-paced merchant finance. Jurists systematized law into hardened categories of public and private, learned and lay, independent white men and dependent, women, children, and ethnic and religious minorities. The textual record of legal modernization is vast. Hundreds of volumes of regulations were formulated, copied, and re-formulated by legislatures. Millions of case reports became the authoritative building blocks for the thousands of treatises from which modern American law was constructed. Our analysis and visualizations of legal modernism’s textual history are gathered at this website, along with datasets of use to other scholars.

Zotero

Tue, 17 May 2022 13:17:50 +0000

Zotero

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research. Created at RRCHNM in 2006, Zotero and is used by millions of people every day all around the world, making it one of the most successful pieces of software ever built for the humanities. In 2016, RRCHNM shifted Omeka to the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, a non-profit corporation created by several faculty from RRCHNM (and others) in 2009. CDS has been financially responsible for this very successful software since 2013.

World History Commons

Tue, 17 May 2022 13:03:49 +0000

World History Commons

With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) George Mason University is partnering with the World History Association and Associate Professor Adam Clulow (Monash University, Australia) to create World History Commons. This Open Educational Resource (OER), will provide high quality, peer-reviewed resources for teaching and research in world and global history. World History Commons will introduce new humanities scholarship and pedagogy while preserving and enhancing widely-used resources from World History Matters, the award-winning, NEH-funded collection of world history websites, and the Global History Reader, a collaboration between scholars at Monash University and Warwick University (UK). Content includes website reviews, primary sources, and teaching and methods guides.

Virginia Studies

Tue, 17 May 2022 12:58:34 +0000

Virginia Studies

Virginia Studies: Thinking Historically About Virginia is an engaging, self-paced, asynchronous course for teachers. The course is taught online through a series of interactive modules. Each module guides teachers through Virginia history with primary sources as well as video, audio, and text analysis. Participants learn about the history of Virginia, practice historical thinking skills, and develop strategies for using course resources and techniques in the classroom. Since the site launch in 2012, more than 250 teachers have completed the course for either graduate credit or recertification points. RRCHNM developed the course material, researched primary sources, and created the videos. Center-affiliated instructors provide individualized feedback and monitor student progress throughout each session. The online course was funded by the Virginia Department of Education.

Tropy

Tue, 17 May 2022 12:41:49 +0000

Tropy

Tropy is a freely licensed and open-source software tool that allows researchers to collect and organize the digital photographs that they take in their research, add information to those photos individually or in bulk, using customizable templates, and export both photographs and associated information to other platforms. Tailor-made for researchers, Tropy also makes it possible to group photos into documents, annotate photos, add customs tags, and to search across the metadata fields, notes and tags to quickly find sources.

Transatlantic Encounters

Tue, 17 May 2022 12:17:26 +0000

Transatlantic Encounters

In the years between World War I and World War II Paris was at the center of the art world. Indeed, the very essence of twentieth-century art history stems from the movements and avant-garde experiments that emerged in Paris in the early years of the century. Modernism, no matter how it was rearticulated in distant locations, almost always had roots in Paris. While numerous scholars have written about the arts in Paris during this period, none examine the participation of Latin American artists in the Parisian art scene even though these artists both contributed to and re-interpreted nearly every major modernist trend between the wars, including cubism (Pablo Curatella Manes, Emilio Pettoruti, Diego Rivera, Angel Zárraga), surrealism (Antonio Berni, Wifredo Lam, Francisco Lazo, Roberto Matta, César Moro), constructivism (Jaime Colson, Germán Cueto, Amelia Peláez, Juan del Prete, Joaquín Torres-García), and the more figural modes associated with the School of Paris.

Teachinghistory.org

Tue, 17 May 2022 11:37:29 +0000

Teachinghistory.org

Teachinghistory.org (National History Education Clearinghouse) is the central online location for accessing high-quality resources in K-12 U.S. history education. Explore the highlighted content on our homepage or visit individual sections for additional materials. Return often for new content and to join in the vibrant conversation about teaching history.

Scripto

Tue, 17 May 2022 11:16:24 +0000

Scripto

Scripto brings the power of MediaWiki to your collections. Designed to allow members of the public to transcribe a range of different kinds of files, Scripto will increase your content’s findability while building your user community through active engagement. There are plugins or extensions for Drupal, Omeka, and WordPress.

ReSounding the Archives

Tue, 17 May 2022 11:08:38 +0000

ReSounding the Archives

ReSounding the Archives is an interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together digital humanities, history, and music. Partners include: RRCHNM and the College for the Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) at George Mason University (Mason); McIntire Department of Music and Music Library at the University of Virginia (UVA); and History and English Departments, School of Performing Arts, and Special Collections at Virginia Tech (VT). The project’s goal is literally to “re-sound” the archives — to bring World War I sheet music to life through recordings and live performances. Students from Mason, UVA, and VT worked together to select, research, and record music, exploring history from new vantage points. The project website provides digitized sheet music, historical context, and usable recordings of each song.

Papers of the War Department 1784-1800

Tue, 17 May 2022 10:51:19 +0000

Papers of the War Department 1784-1800

On the night of November 8, 1800, fire devastated the United States War Office, consuming the papers, records, and books stored there. Two weeks later, Secretary of War Samuel Dexter lamented in a letter that “All the papers in my office [have] been destroyed.” For the past two centuries, the official records of the War Department effectively began with Dexter’s letter. Papers of the War Department 1784-1800, an innovative digital editorial project, will change that by making some 55,000 long lost documents of the early War Department available online to scholars, students, and the general public. By providing free and open access to these previously unavailable documents, Papers of the War Department 1784-1800 will offer a unique window into a time when there was no law beyond the Constitution, when the federal government hardly existed outside of the Army and Navy, and when a new nation struggled to define itself at home and abroad.

Pandemic Religion

Tue, 17 May 2022 10:23:58 +0000

Pandemic Religion

Pandemic Religion: A Digital Archive collects and preserves the experiences of congregants and religious communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project seeks to create a digitally archive documenting how religious institutions and individuals adapted their practices to meet this public health challenge. The archive also seeks to capture the instances and motivations of those opted to resist local and state government public health instructions. The archive is comprised of recorded remote sermons, social media materials, digital photographs, personal stories and more.

Omeka

Tue, 17 May 2022 10:03:24 +0000

Omeka

Omeka is a next-generation open source web publishing platform and content management system designed for museums, libraries, historic sites, historical societies, scholars, enthusiasts, and educators . Created at RRCHNM in 2007, Omeka is now one of the most used content management systems in the humanities. In 2016, RRCHNM shifted Omeka to the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, a non-profit corporation created by several faculty from RRCHNM (and others) in 2009. CDS has been financially responsible for this very successful software since 2013.

Mozilla Digital Memory Bank

Tue, 17 May 2022 09:57:55 +0000

Mozilla Digital Memory Bank

Organized by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, The Mozilla Digital Memory Bank is a permanent, open, peer-produced digital archive of Mozilla history. With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, The Mozilla Digital Memory Bank collects and permanently preserves digital texts, images, audio, video, personal narratives, and oral histories related to Mozilla, its products, and its community of developers, testers, and users. The Mozilla Digital Memory Bank is part of CHNM’s Echo project, which, since 2001, has worked to develop new ways of collecting, preserving, and presenting the history of science, technology, and industry online. Building on CHNM’s earlier work on the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank aims to create a lasting resource for generations of students, teachers, scholars, and members of the general public interested in the history of the Internet, open source software, and Mozilla.

Maritime Asia

Tue, 17 May 2022 09:48:51 +0000

Maritime Asia

Maritime Asia is an international collaboration with Adam Clulow at Monash University/University of Texas at Austin and Xing Hang at Brandeis University. This digital world history project explores the fierce rivalry between the Dutch East India Company and the Zheng maritime network as they fought for control over key trades and sea routes. The project includes digital exhibits on these maritime powers, the deerskin trade and territorial claims to Taiwan, as well as a timeline, biographies of key actors, an archive with primary sources, and an annotated bibliography for further exploration. Maritime Asia also features a classroom simulation exercise, “Pirates, States, and Diplomacy in a Multipolar Maritime Asia” for advanced high school and college students. This is designed to place students at the center of a turbulent maritime world in which a range of territorial powers and armed trading enterprises competed for control over key sea lanes.

Mapping Early American Elections

Mon, 16 May 2022 17:41:52 +0000

Mapping Early American Elections

Mapping Early American Elections will offer a window into the formative era of American politics by producing interactive maps and visualizations of Congressional and state legislative elections from 1787 to 1825. The project makes available the electoral returns and spatial data underlying those maps, along with topical essays on the political history of the period and tutorials to encourage users to use the datasets to create their own maps.

Making the History of 1989

Mon, 16 May 2022 17:35:28 +0000

Making the History of 1989

CHNM received generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the German Historical Institute (Washington D.C.) to create Making the History of 1989, a new website on the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.Making the History of 1989 has three key features providing students, teachers, and scholars free and open access to:

hundreds of high quality primary sources on or related to the events of 1989 and the end of the Cold War in Europe;
multimedia interviews with prominent historians that make visible the processes by which historians transform events and sources into historical narratives; and
lesson plans, document based questions, and strategies that provide context for teaching the history of 1989 with primary sources.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution

Mon, 16 May 2022 17:22:55 +0000

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution

This accessible and lively introduction to the French Revolution presents an extraordinary archive of some of the most important documentary evidence from the Revolution, including 338 texts, 245 images, and a number of maps and songs. Lynn Hunt of UCLA and Jack Censer of George Mason University—both internationally renowned scholars of the Revolution—served as principal authors and editors. The site is a collaboration of CHNM and American Social History Project (City University of New York), and supported by grants from the Florence Gould Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Hurricane Digital Memory Bank

Mon, 16 May 2022 17:03:43 +0000

Hurricane Digital Memory Bank

The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The project contributes to the ongoing effort by historians and archivists to preserve the record of these storms by collecting first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, and podcasts.

Histories of the National Mall

Mon, 16 May 2022 16:51:26 +0000

Histories of the National Mall

Histories of the National Mall makes visible the rich past of the National Mall for its millions of on-site visitors through a website easily accessible by mobile phones that provides content and interpretation far superior to static guidebooks and existing mobile tours and applications. The National Council on Public History selected it as the Outstanding Public History Project for 2015.

Historical Thinking Matters

Mon, 16 May 2022 16:45:08 +0000

Historical Thinking Matters

Focused on key topics in U.S. history, this website is designed to teach students how to read primary sources critically and how to critique and construct historical narratives.

Hidden in Plain Sight

Mon, 16 May 2022 16:35:04 +0000

Hidden in Plain Sight

Hidden in Plain Sight: Exploring American History is an online course for K–12 teachers that emphasizes iterative learning, primary source analysis, and an active approach to studying history. More than 400 K-12 teachers from a wide geographic area have taken this online course with a 95% completion rate. Through a contract with the Virginia Department of Education, RRCHNM researched and developed the course content, designed the visual interface, and built the site in Drupal, using CHNM-developed custom modules to enable instructors to interact with students, and students with each other, in near real-time.

Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives

Mon, 16 May 2022 16:12:14 +0000

Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives

CHNM’s first online exhibitions, GULAG: Many Days, Many Lives immerses visitors in the varied experiences the vast and brutal Soviet prison camp system. The Gulag existed neither as a single unified experience, nor as a single unified institution. Comprised of a variety of forms of harsh detention for a diversity of prisoners, it existed as a massive machine influencing the lives of countless people. GULAG: Many Days, Many Lives presents this diversity of experience through full prisoner biographies, audio and video clips, an extensive primary source archive, and a set of illustrated, narrative exhibits. In cooperation with the Gulag Museum of Perm, Russia, the website also offers a virtual tour of a reconstructed prison camp.

The Green Tunnel Podcast

Mon, 16 May 2022 16:06:58 +0000

The Green Tunnel Podcast

The Green Tunnel is a podcast about the history of the Appalachian Trail and is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Episodes in Season One included an examination of the founding of the trail, one on the critical role that women have played in the history of the AT, another on the quirky history of trail food, and a look at the shelters and structures that have been built along the trail over time–just to name a few. Many episodes contain rare, never before heard audio of people like Benton MacKaye, who dreamed up the whole idea of a multi-state long-distance hiking trail, and Grandma Gatewood, the first woman to thru hike the trail alone. But we also hear from hikers, volunteers, park rangers, and leaders in the trail community. Our show notes and social media will include rare photos from the first 100 years of the AT, most of them generously made available to us by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.

For Virginians: Government Matters

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 16:13:23 +0000

For Virginians: Government Matters

For Virginians: Government Matters is a free online teaching and learning resource highlighting active citizen involvement, the impact of state and local government on daily life, and how individuals shape their communities in the Commonwealth. There are four key features: A Teaching Source Database with introductions and essential questions to offer guidance on how to use those sources critically and tools for annotating and organizing the sources; Website Reviews that focus on valuable online resources for teaching and learning Virginia state and local government; Teaching Activities focused on state and local government that provide context, teaching tools, and strategies for teaching primary sources drawn from the Teaching Source Database; and Teaching Case Studies by experienced scholars and teachers that model strategies for using primary sources to teach state and local government in the Commonwealth.

Discover Diplomacy

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 16:42:00 +0000

Discover Diplomacy

Discover Diplomacy is a set of diplomatic simulations for use in classrooms developed for the United States Diplomacy Center. Students who take part in the simulations get to experience how diplomacy works and what it means to understand someone else’s point of view. The goal is for participants to work together, as opposing countries with competing interests, to negotiate common ground, and propose solutions. The eight simulations cover topics ranging from migration and wildlife trafficking, to HIV/AIDS relief and nuclear crisis. They each include teacher and student packets, name tags, stakeholder fact sheets, and tent cards, and are supported with instructional videos and a teachers guide.

Digital Public Humanities Graduate Certificate

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 16:37:03 +0000

Digital Public Humanities Graduate Certificate

The Digital Public Humanities Graduate Certificate is an online program that consists of three courses and a “virtual” summer internship with the Smithsonian Institution. The courses include synchronous online class sessions, synchronous individual meetings between student and instructor, and asynchronous modules. There are no textbooks, video lectures, or multiple-choice quizzes. Content consists of readings, short videos, interactive activities, and digital projects. The first course, “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” won a GMU Distance Education Award in 2015.

Digital Methods for Military History

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 16:35:16 +0000

Digital Methods for Military History

Digital Methods for Military History is an NEH-funded Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. It aims to help military historians investigate new ways of doing research digitally, as well as learning about new ways of creating digital projects.The two-week institute will devote time to multiple topics, including investigating how digital history has been able to widen the scope of historical inquiry, and how military history has benefited from this wider scope; teaching participants how to create and customize humanities data sets from the vast amount of data that exists on military history; and teaching participants then how to ask questions of the data sets they have created and how to find the answers using digital tools.The institute is targeted at military historians with little to no formal training in digital tools and methods. Applicants should have a particular project in mind as well as sources for that project.

Digital History & Argument white paper

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 16:22:11 +0000

Digital History & Argument white paper

This white paper is the product of the Arguing with Digital History Workshop organized by Stephen Robertson and Lincoln Mullen of George Mason University, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The two-day workshop, which involved twenty-four invited participants at different stages in their careers, working in a variety of fields with a range of digital methods, was conceived with a focus on one particular form of digital history, arguments directed at scholarly audiences and disciplinary conversations. Despite recurrent calls for digital history in this form from digital and analog historians, few examples exist. The original aim of the workshop was to promote digital history that directly engaged with historiographical arguments by producing a white paper that addressed the conceptual and structural issues involved in such scholarship. Input from the participants expanded the scope of the white paper to also elaborate the arguments made by other forms of digital history and address the obstacles to professional recognition of those interpretations. The result was a document that aims to help bridge the argumentative practices of digital history and the broader historical profession. On the one hand, it aims to demonstrate to the wider historical discipline how digital history is already making arguments in different forms than analog scholarship. On the other hand, it aims to help digital historians weave the scholarship they produce into historiographical conversations in the discipline. To produce the white paper, the organizers, Robertson and Mullen, shaped documents created by small groups in the course of the workshop, together with the response papers submitted by participants prior to the workshop, into a draft document. That draft was made available as a Google doc to the participants, and those who had been invited but had to withdraw, for comments. Robertson and Mullen then revised the draft in response to that feedback to produce the final white paper. All those who participated in the workshop or provided feedback on the draft are credited as authors of the white paper. A roundtable on the white paper, featuring participants in the workshop, was held as part of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, on January 6, 2018.

Declaration of Independence by Translation

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 16:19:54 +0000

Declaration of Independence by Translation

How does translation affect how we understand the past? In this roundtable, historians discuss the translation and reception of the Declaration of Independence in Japan, Mexico, Russia, China, Poland, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Israel. In addition to these reflections, the site includes actual translations of the Declaration into several different languages and “retranslations” back into English to illustrate the effects of translation on how a key historical document has been understood.

Death By Numbers

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 16:17:01 +0000

Death By Numbers

One of the most dreaded diseases in early modern England was plague. The city of London alone lost an estimated 225,000 people to plague in the century between 1563 and 1665. As an extension of government attempts to track plague deaths during outbreaks, London officials started publicly distributing a weekly series of mortality statistics called the Bills of Mortality at the turn of the seventeenth century. London’s population rapidly embraced the bills as a tool for evaluating their risk of imminent death, which led to the bills’ continuous weekly publication starting in 1603. These public bills also contained all-inclusive death counts and numbers for dozens of other causes of death, ensuring their ongoing publication and widespread distribution for over a century after the final outbreak of plague in England. This project uses the Bills of Mortality to investigate how lived experiences of plague outbreaks intersected with an emerging quantitative mentality among the people of early modern England. It examines how ordinary people aggregated, transformed, and interpreted death counts in order to draw conclusions about changes in the early modern use of and trust in numbers over time. In doing so, the project investigates contemporary perceptions of numbers and historicizes a quantitative method of knowledge generation that has become central to twenty-first-century understandings of the world. The foundation of this project is the Bills of Mortality dataset, created through the digitization of primary sources and their subsequent transcription in DataScribe: specialized software designed to create validated structured datasets from historical sources. The project deploys custom Python code on this dataset to assess the arithmetical accuracy of bills’ internal calculations and their summary statistics. It combines this assessment with close reading of historical sources in order draw conclusions about early modern use of and trust in numbers. Underlying these analyses are two questions: (1) Did people put their trust in the authority of the bills’ internal sums and extracted summary statistics because of the mathematical accuracy of their compilation, reflecting a belief in the importance of correctly quantifying mortality for assessing risk? (2) Did people put their trust in the bills’ numbers because they were numbers, seeing the bills and their mortality statistics as an inherently trustworthy form of knowledge because of its numerical basis? In exploring these questions, this project expands ongoing discussions in the histories of epistemology, mathematics, medicine, and public health, and provides novel insights into people’s changing perceptions of and reactions to the quantification of risk and mortality within the greater context of the changing numerical landscape of early modern England. The project also supports a variety of secondary and student-driven analyses on the dataset as part of publishing and publicizing the myriad potential reuses for this longitudinal dataset of mortality in a pre-modern city. Through the inclusion of students and their research interests, the project models interdisciplinary paths for students interested in both historical and STEM research and demonstrates the myriad career and research options available at the intersection of history and STEM.

DataScribe

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 16:15:27 +0000

DataScribe

DataScribe is a structured data transcription module for Omeka S. It provides an easy-to-use interface for users to identify the structure of the data within their sources, accurately and quickly transcribe data into a format amenable for computational analysis, and export their generated datasets for that analysis. Scholars often collect sources, such as government forms or institutional records, intending to transcribe them into datasets which can be analyzed or visualized. This module enables scholars to identify the structure of the data within their sources, speed up the transcription of their sources, and reliably structure their transcriptions in a form amenable to computational analysis. Scholars can turn sources into tables of data stored as numbers, dates, categories, and more. Because this module builds on the Omeka S platform, it allows scholars to display transcriptions alongside the source images and metadata, to crowdsource transcriptions, and to publish their results on the web.

Current Research In Digital History

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 16:07:05 +0000

Current Research In Digital History

Current Research in Digital History is an annual open-access, peer-reviewed online publication. Its primary aim is to encourage and publish scholarship in digital history that offers discipline-specific arguments and interpretations. By featuring short essays, it also seeks to provide an opportunity to make arguments on the basis of ongoing research in larger projects.Essays published in CRDH are first presented at an annual one-day conference at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. Authors submit their essays in the fall, and then the conference is held in the spring. Each essay goes through two rounds of peer review, first by the conference program committee, and then by the conference commentator. CRDH is published at the end of August, less than a year after essays are submitted. The platform for CRDH offers the following features in order to effectively publish a range of scholarship: publication of visualizations, graphics, and narratives publication of associated data or code in a research compendium external hosting of content if necessary, provided that authors agree to maintain the content DOIs and other metadata for all articles indexing in Google Scholar and other academic databases CRDH is funded by donations to the RRCHNM Director’s Fund. Members of the program committee, commentators and participants in the conference plenary roundtable are paid small stipends to recognize the time they commit. Four $200 stipends are available to support the participation of presenters who have to travel to the conference. You can donate to support CRDH.

Creating Local Linkages

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 16:01:47 +0000

Creating Local Linkages

Creating Local Linkages provides professional development opportunities to train public librarians in facilitating digital local history projects in their community. Through this online program, RRCHNM invites librarians to explore their collections with the eyes of an historian and to expand their digital skills.Genealogy draws patrons to public libraries with local history collections. Their presence is an opportunity to connect them to a broader history than their family tree and introduce the processes of historical thinking and developing contexts for interpreting historical sources. Doing local history work increasingly involves harnessing an expanding universe of digital sources and digital publication platforms, providing public librarians with an opportunity to develop the digital literacy of their patrons.

Consolation Prize

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 16:00:17 +0000

Consolation Prize

When you think of the most exciting, controversial, or salacious moments in American history, your first thought probably isn’t the story of a U.S. consul. Consuls were charged by the U.S. State Department with reporting American trade in cities across the world, as well as taking care of Americans abroad, but they had little official diplomatic power. They weren’t negotiating treaties or starting wars; they weren’t leading charges into battle or changing the political landscape. Or were they? The responsibility for the United States’ reputation in other parts of the world often fell squarely on the shoulders of consuls, who were the first ones called in when Americans got themselves in trouble or were mistreated while they were abroad. How they interpreted their duties sometimes got them involved in all kinds of complicated circumstances. And often, their actions on a personal level had ramifications far up the chain, even making a difference in national politics or international relations. The stories of these consuls deserve to be told. Consolation Prize is a narrative-style podcast, hosted by Abby Mullen, who talks to scholars across the historical discipline about consuls and their world. You’ll also hear the voices of these consuls, their colleagues, and their enemies, telling their own stories. In this season, you’ll hear about rhinoceroses, and coffee trading, and hymn writing; you’ll hear about imprisonment, slavery, and oppression. You’ll hear stories of revenge, humiliation, and bitter feuds, but also stories of triumph, joy, and delight. You’ll go places as close to home as Vera Cruz, Mexico, and as far away as Canton and Zanzibar. Please join us as we travel the globe with nineteenth-century consuls!

Collecting These Times

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 15:58:23 +0000

Collecting These Times

Collecting These Times is an interactive website and digital repository for collections that document the myriad, diverse ways in which American Jewish individuals and communities are experiencing, responding, and adapting to the Covid-19 pandemic. Collecting These Times connects American Jews to Jewish institutions and other collecting projects which can gather and preserve their experiences of the pandemic. Individuals can find relevant collecting projects through the portal and easily contribute materials such as images, videos, audio recordings, documents, and oral histories to collecting institutions in different parts of the U.S.Researchers and community members can view materials to better understand how American Jews are experiencing baz’man hazeh, these times. Collecting These Times is a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Council of American Jewish Museums.

Children and Youth in History

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 15:55:15 +0000

Children and Youth in History

With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Children and Youth in History website was designed to help teachers and students learn about young people throughout history by providing access to information about the lived experiences of children and youth from multiple perspectives as well as changing notions about childhood and adolescence in past cultures and civilizations. The materials on this website address such questions as: What was it like to be a child or adolescent throughout history? How is childhood defined? How has it changed and how has it remained the same? What factors have shaped childhood and how did children shape history, society, and culture?Children and Youth in History is a free website with four key features: a Primary Source Database with 200 resources along with guidance on how to use those sources critically and tools for annotating and organizing the sources; 50 Website Reviews that focus on valuable online resources for studying and teaching the history of childhood and youth in world history; 10 Teaching Modules that provide historical context, teaching tools, and strategies for teaching with sets of primary sources drawn from the Primary Source Database; and 20 Teaching Case Studies by experienced scholars and teachers that model strategies for using primary sources to teach the history of childhood and youth.

Child Custody Project

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 15:52:17 +0000

Child Custody Project

Developed with funding from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the Child Custody Project presents scholarly essays exploring child custody topics in history, law, and society.Topics include child custody in popular media, changing definitions of “best interests” of the child, and child custody laws in Virginia from the colonial era to the present.RRCHNM built the site in WordPress using responsive web design technology, providing for an enjoyable reading experience on desktop, laptop, and mobile devices. Content strategy focused on conveying the societal significance of child custody issues and providing visitors a way to follow themes across essays. The site information design is intended to maximize the user experience in reading long-form essays, while remaining flexible for expanded content in the future.

American Religious Ecologies

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 15:45:29 +0000

American Religious Ecologies

American Religious Ecologies seeks to understand how congregations from different religious traditions related to one another by creating new datasets, maps and visualizations for the history of American religion. While some Americans have lived in rich religious ecologies, surrounded by a plethora of denominational choices, others have lived in places with only one or a few religious options. Using new and existing datasets, this project documents and maps these diverse environments, in order to provide a fuller and more vivid depiction of the religious landscape of the early twentieth-century United States.With the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project is currently digitizing approximately 232,000 schedules from the 1926 U.S. Census of Religious Bodies, a treasure trove of congregation- and place-specific data. These schedules will be made available on the project’s website as photos of the records and as a transcribed dataset. The project is also investigating denominational records and other sources of data. Finally the project will use these datasets to create maps and visualizations which offer a rich depiction of how congregations related to one another in their local environments.

The September 11 Digital Archive

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 16:47:22 +0000

The September 11 Digital Archive

The September 11 Digital Archive collects, preserves, and presents the history of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. It has become the leading digital repository of material related to the events of 9/11/2001 and includes more than 150,000 first-hand accounts, emails, images, and other digital materials. The Archive was a collaboration between CHNM and the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Bracero History Archive

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 16:45:37 +0000

Bracero History Archive

Bracero History Archive collects and makes available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America.In a partnership between George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, the National Museum of American History, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Brown University, Bracero History Archive will grow to include sound files and transcripts of interviews with program participants, photographs, documents, and other files of interest. Users, which will include researchers, students, and others interested in the Bracero program, will be able to conduct searches using several different fields.

THATCamp

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 16:42:55 +0000

THATCamp

Short for “The Humanities and Technology Camp,” THATCamp is a user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities—an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot. Since the first THATCamp was held in 2008, there have been more than a hundred THATCamps around the world.

Amboyna Conspiracy Trial

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 16:41:06 +0000

Amboyna Conspiracy Trial

Trials fascinate us because they present a single question — innocent or guilty. But trials can also be used to tell us about a particular society at a particular time. This project focuses on a famous legal case from the early modern period, the Amboyna Conspiracy Trial of 1623. In this trial, Dutch authorities accused a group of English merchants and Japanese mercenaries of plotting to seize control of a castle on a remote island in modern-day Indonesia, killing anyone who resisted. The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial is the product of a long-term collaboration between Dr. Adam Clulow and the RRCHNM. Funding for the project was generously provided by Monash University.

For Us The Living

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 11:29:28 +0000

For Us The Living

For Us the Living: Learning from the Stories of the Alexandria National Cemetery is a series of online educational modules designed to teach high school students American history through the lens of national cemeteries. The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, in partnership with Alexandria County Public Schools, developed For Us the Living as a part of the Veterans Legacy Program, a project supported by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) National Cemetery Administration (NCA).

American History Now

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 10:14:56 +0000

American History Now

American History Now is an experiment in scholarly communication. Neither a scholarly journal nor a blog, American History Now highlights new ways of writing, reading, and disseminating ideas in the digital realm. We’re looking to bypass the inertia of 19th century models of publishing, creating a new model of publishing and dissemination that relies on the principles of curation and collaboration. We aim to use digital tools to build communities of shared interest within and beyond the boundaries of academia.

Eagle Eye Citizen

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 10:04:12 +0000

Eagle Eye Citizen

Eagle Eye Citizen engages middle and high school students in solving and creating interactive challenges about Congress, American history, civics, and government with Library of Congress primary sources in order to develop students’ civic understanding and historical thinking skills. Created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Eagle Eye Citizen is a Congress, Civic Participation, and Primary Sources Project and is supported by a grant from the Library of Congress.