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Not Even Past

The Public Archive: The Paperwork of Slavery

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Slave passes were an early form of racialized surveillance, small pieces of paper with the power to decide where black men and women could travel, who they could meet, and whether they might be subject to violence. Digitized by Galia Sims, The documents in “Guards and Pickets: Paperwork of Slavery” provide a glimpse into the paperwork created to control the movement and relationships of the enslaved, like passes, jail fees, marriage certificates, patrol invoices.

More on Sims’ project and The Public Archive here.

You may also like:

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh by Daina Ramey Berry
Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance by Alina Scott
The Illegal Slave Trade in Texas, 1808-1865 by Maria Hammack

The Public Archive: Mercenary Monks

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Jonathan Seefeldt’s digital project “Mercenary Monks” provides a glimpse into the lives and continuing legacy of the Dadupanthi Nagas—an early modern monastic community from the semi-desert region of western India. Poems, photographs, and other documents illuminate a monastic world of raising mercenary armies, caring for widows and child brides, providing credit and other banking services, collecting tax revenue from farmers, providing merit and prestige to an emerging merchant class, and asserting a (short-lived) form of political independence.

More on Seefeldt’s project and The Public Archive here.

You may also like:

Indrani Chatterjee on Monasteries and Memory in Northeast India
Indian Revolt of 1857, a digital project by Anuj Kaushal
Victoria & Abdul: Simulacra and Simulation by Gajendra Singh

The Public Archive: The Gálvez Visita of 1765

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Created by Brittany Erwin, “Bureaucracy on the Ground: The Gálvez Visita of 1765” examines the localized consequences and on-the-ground implications of the royal inspection, or visita general, administered by José de Gálvez in New Spain from 1765-1771. The project includes a curated collection of digitized documents from the Genaro García Collection at the Benson Latin American Collection, blogs, and lesson plans.

More on Erwin’s project and The Public Archive here.

Also by Brittany Erwin on Not Even Past:

The Museo Regional de Oriente in San Miguel, El Salvador
The National Museum of Anthropology in in San Salvador
Review of The Archaeology and History of Colonial Mexico by Enrique Rodríguez Alegría (2016)

You may also like:

Renata Keller reviews Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Americas, 1492-1830 by J.H. Elliott (2007)
Acapulco-Manila: the Galleon, Asia and Latin America, 1565-1815 by Kristie Flannery
Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional by Haley Schroer

 

The Public Archive: Indian Revolt of 1857

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Also known as “Sepoy Mutiny,” the Indian Rebellion of 1857 represented a major, although unsuccessful, challenge to British colonialism. Anuj Kaushal’s digital project, titled “Indian Revolt of 1857”, considers the question of Indian nationalism during the rebellion and British response through blogs, lesson plans, and digitized issues of Illustrated London Times and New York Daily Tribune.

More on Kaushal’s project and The Public Archive here

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The Public Archive: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions

Kolaches (Credit: Whitney, via Flickr)

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Tracy Heim’s digital project, titled “Food Migrations: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions”, explores the experience of migration through the lens of food. Using the online publishing platform Scalar, “Food Migrations” not only offers a taste of Texan-Czech culinary culture through recipe books, photographs, and maps, but also considers the ways immigrant cultures are preserved – and changed – through food.

More on Heim’s project and The Public Archive here.

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The Public Archive: María Luisa Puga and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

On September 19, 1985, a devastating 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck Mexico City. María Luisa Puga (1944-2004), a talented Mexican novelist from the Post-Boom movement, documented the events and the aftermath in her journal. On After the Silence: María Luisa Puga and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake, Ashley Garcia has brought Puga’s compelling first-hand account to life, including addenda that Puga later made to the text, as well as newspaper clippings and drawings found among its pages.

More on Garcia’s project and The Public Archive here.

You may also like:

History Museums: Museo Nacionál de Antropología, Mexico by Robert Wilks
Andrew Weiss reviews Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico by Elaine Carey (2005)
Notes from the Field: Northeast Japan after the Tsunami by David Conrad

The Public Archive: The Road to Sesame Street

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

The Road to Sesame Street by Peter Kunze features government documents tracing the development of the Public Broadcast Act of 1967, the landmark legislation that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR. Using materials from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, this project provides a behind-the-scenes view of the power players, interest groups, and decisions that laid the groundwork for American public media through digitized documents, blog posts, and lesson plans.

More on Kunze’s project and The Public Archive here.

You may also like:

Digital Teaching: Mapping Networks Across Avant-Garde Magazines by Meghan Forbes
Dorothy Parker Loved the Funnies by David Ochsner
Media and Politics From the Prague Spring Archive by Ian Goodale

The Public Archive: Qahvehkhaneh, Reading Iranian Newspapers

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

The coffeehouse, qahvehkhaneh, was an important political and cultural institution in Iran in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As men drank coffee, played backgammon, and discussed business, they also listened to impassioned pleas for democracy and reform from newspapers published in the Ottoman Empire, Russian Caucasus, and British India, smuggled into Iran and read aloud. Hoping to replicate the qahvehkhane’s spirit of sharing knowledge and camaraderie for anyone interested in Iran, Andrew Akhlaghi’s project comprises of digitized issues of Etella’at, an Iranian newspaper founded in Tehran in 1926. In addition to the newspaper collection, this site is also allows students of Persian to collaboratively translate articles.

More on Akhlaghi’s project and The Public Archive here.

You may also like:

Remembering the Iran-Iraq War by Shaherzad Ahmadi
Maria José Afanador-Llach reviews Digital History: A Guide by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig
The Public Archive: Woven Into History by Alina Scott

The Public Archive: Frederic Allen Williams

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider. Based in New York City, he became known for his talks on Native American art delivered in his midtown studio using magic lantern slides, an early type of image projector. By digitizing a sizable collection of Williams’ prints, negatives, lantern slides, and other ephemera held at the Harry Ransom Center, Jesse Ritner‘s digital project not only makes these materials accessible to wider audiences, but also reflects on using photography as historians and teachers.

More on Ritner’s project and the Public Archive here.

Also by Jesse Ritner on Not Even Past:

Death, Danger, and Identity at 12,000 Feet
The Curious History of Lincoln’s Birth Cabin
Paying for Peace: Reflections on “Lasting Peace” Monument
What Makes a Good History Blog?

You may also like:

The Public Archive: Woven Into History by Alina Scott
Who Put Native American Sign Language in the US Mail? by Jennifer Graber
A Graphic Revolution: The New Archive (No. 19) by Joseph Parrott

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