William Bradford Huie at 100

The William Bradford Huie@100 project, inspired by the recent gift of Huie materials to the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library at The University of Alabama from his widow Martha Huie, is a celebration of Huie’s life and work.   WBH@100 is a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary look at the history and culture of much of the 20th century through the eyes of one brilliant writer. William Bradford Huie graduated from The University of Alabama in 1930, and from his days as a student, through his long and varied career as an author and journalist, he was able to find a great story and bring forth the truth. This website will serve as a permanent gathering place for ideas, scholarship, and information on Huie and his legacy.

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Tuscaloosa Environmental Digital

Tuscaloosa Environmental Digital (TED) is the first phase of a long-term project which aims to culminate in the creation of a digital hub for environmental history. TED showcases projects created by students under the direction of Bartow Elmore, investigating the environmental history of Tuscaloosa, focusing on the central industries that have operated in this university town over the past fifty years. Students have researched specific businesses and their environmental impacts and initiatives, adding their findings to an interactive map on the TED website. TED is an iterative project, and students in Fall 2015 will continue its work by researching other local businesses, with the eventual aim of taking this project state- and eventually region-wide.

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Trash Poetica

Trash Poetica is a digital poetry project which combines creative writing with mapping technologies to chart and repurpose the items which are being discarded as “trash” in Tuscaloosa. Its aim is to explore the ways that trash or garbage can be re-envisaged and take on a new, productive life if approached through a creative lens, as well as showcasing the wide-ranging environmental impact of the discarding process on our local community.

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Textile Design Techniques

Dr. Amanda J. Thompson’s CTD class split into groups to undertake extensive research projects on the history of different Textile Design Techniques. Students researched the technical aspects of each textile, the functions of the textile in society, how the textile exists today, and any legal/moral issues surrounding the textile. This website documents their findings.

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Scenes from the Lincoln Normal School

The ADHC partnered with Dr. Christa Vogelius, CLIR Post-Doctoral Fellow for the A. S. Williams III Americana Collection to digitize two rare photograph albums documenting daily life on campus at the Lincoln Normal School in Marion, AL. The school was established for the education of freed slaves after the Civil War, and we worked together to create a website which uses the digitized albums dating from 1909 to 1924 to document the history of Lincoln Normal School. We were proud to launch the website in April 2014, and hope to add to it using other similar photographic holdings in the Williams Collection in the future.

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RELephantUA

Studying religion in culture is relevant. At the University of Alabama, our program generates a range of significant questions about classification, interpretation, identification, and the construction of tradition, among others. These questions, though, are not simply relevant for topics identified with religion but apply broadly to many aspects of societies in which we live. To illustrate that broader relevance, we will apply various questions that have arisen in our Religious Studies program to a broad range of topics and present those questions and their relevance for a broad audience through this website. This website reflects some of the work that we have done throughout our time in the program, culminating in the Capstone REL Senior Seminar in Spring 2016.

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Native American Digital History Project

This project houses work done by students in Heather Miyano Kopelson’s HY300 course, examining the histories of hundreds of indigenous peoples in North America from early human habitation to the present day, with a focus on those residing in what is now the United States and Canada. Students are exploring Native American history in numerous different ways, all of which are displayed in this website, including analysis of primary source materials from archives to give a first-hand understanding of this complex and wide-ranging subject from many different angles, to the creation of an interactive map of significant historical locations in Native American history such as nearby Moundville, AL. Students are also contributing entries to a detailed timeline of important events in Native American history. This website will be added to by student in multiple future iterations of this course, to foster a learning community of participants in HY300 over time, and to create a valuable public resource about Native American history.

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Music Politics

What is the role of music in political movements? How have political forces shaped music culture? Students in UH 155: Music and Political Movements consider how music shapes and creates human society, and how the semiotic and communicative power of music has been employed in the service of political movements around the world and through history. Class study includes, but is not limited to, hip-hop in North America and the Middle East, Chilean Nueva Canción and other revolutionary movements in Central and South America, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, wars and nationalism in the United States and Europe, Music and Politico-Religious Reform in the Middle Ages, and Civil Rights in the United States and South Africa. This website is a cumulative knowledge repository for students in successive sections of Music and Political Movements, and reflects a process of discovery. Students contribute to an ever-growing timeline that highlights particular musical pieces or events that, through initial intention or acquired meaning, have shaped or expressed political sentiment. Students also showcase their primary source projects undertaken at the Hoole Special Collections library. Finally, students create presentations of their research to be featured on this website.

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Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe

Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe is a new online resource in development at the University of Alabama in collaboration with the Alabama Digital Humanities Center (ADHC). The goal of the Makers Project is to encourage sustained, interdisciplinary consideration of the role early modern women played in the hands-on production of visual and material culture in the courts of Europe. The Makers Project Team is in the process of designing a web-based platform that will serve as an interactive digital lab for scholars, encouraging study, collaborative research, innovative approaches, and dissemination of information dedicated to this field. The peer-reviewed digital space will allow scholars to upload visual and textual resources – biographical, archival, and printed. It will also include a dynamic mapping tool designed to highlight the connections between objects, artists, patrons, and materials. The pilot project, initiated in Fall, 2015, involves a significant pedagogical component, representing collaboration between faculty, graduate students, and staff of the ADHC.

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