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.