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.
Megan McQuaid’s digital project, titled “Animating Italian Immigration: Sicilian-American Puppetry”, sheds light on the vibrant world of Sicilian puppet theater, or opera dei pupi, in Italian-American immigrant communities through digitized newspaper clippings, posters, programs, and photographs of marionettes.
More on McQuaid’s project and The Public Archive here.
You may also like:
Yael Schacher discusses “A View From the Bridge” (Directed by Sidney Lumet, 1962)
New Digital Technologies Bring Ancient Roman Villa to Life by John Clarke
Domesticating Ethnic Foods and Becoming American by Madeline Hsu
