Many people, places, and events which left an impression on the University of Alabama and surrounding community have been commemorated in historical markers and plaques around the campus. This is a collection of those public accounts of our history, in both image and text. Sections include Antebellum Campus, Confederate Commemoration, University Integration, Building Names, Fraternities & Sororities, and Other Historical.
Tag: archive
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.
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.
Hobo News Digital Archive
This project is a collaboration between the ADHC and the St. Louis Public Library which aims to digitize the extremely rare newspaper publication Hobo News from the early twentieth century, and ultimately to make this digital collection available to the public. The Hobo News was created by and for hobos, including a gregarious variety of materials from reports from workers’ societies and conventions to creative re-writings of hymns and popular tunes aiming to propagate socialist ideals, as well as adverts placed by families seeking lost or missing relatives who they hoped might be known among the travelling community. There is only one known complete run of the Hobo News extant to us today, housed in the Special Collections of the St. Louis Public Library, and they are graciously partnering with us to create a proof-of-concept site which we hope will later grow and be available publicly. Ultimately, we aim to incorporate not only scans of the publication on the site, and to make these fully searchable via OCR and detailed metadata, but also to create visualizations showing the geographic range and spread of the publication and its contributors which will highlight its very specific relationship with St. Louis and other key hubs in the early twentieth century.
Historical Archives and Storytelling
UA Genealogies: Historical Archives and Storytelling is a digital archive of the extraordinary family histories discovered by students in Lauren S. Cardon’s EN103 Advanced Composition course. Using a variety of digital and archival resources including the W. S. Hoole and A. S. Williams III Special Collections, students explored their genealogies, creating written narratives documenting particularly significant people or moments in their family histories. UA Genealogies showcases students’ findings about their heritage: in the Narratives section users can browse full-length stories, whilst the Map section displays these stories geographically to give a sense of the global origins of our community at the University of Alabama. Over time, this project will be added to by students participating in future iterations of this course to build a rich narrative documenting the history of the UA student community.
Grammar-land
Grammar-land is a digital version of an exhibition of materials from the W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library. It chronicles the various trends and techniques of grammatical education in America from 1700 to 1930, encompassing subjects ranging from sentence diagramming to children’s textbooks or pedagogical aids for grammatical instruction, as well as investigating the role played by grammar in the founding of American democracy.
View Grammar-land
Black Belt 100 Lenses
Digital Archive Black Belt 100 Lenses creates opportunities for high school students from Alabama’s Black Belt to comment on the region’s unique histories and cultures through photography. The project, started in 2007, has collected more than 7,000 images to date. Working with the Alabama Digital Humanities Center, the Center for Community-Based Partnerships is building a digital archive of its images. This archive will lay the groundwork for the images’ incorporation into the University of Alabama’s library collections and will also form the content for a redesign of the project’s website in Omeka.
Vietnam War Oral History Archive
This oral history archive has been created by students in Dr. Sarah Steinbock-Pratt’s class on the Vietnam War. The course explores the long history of the Vietnam War, beginning with early Vietnamese history and colonization. Over the course of the semester, students have explored different perspectives on the wars in Vietnam, American and Vietnamese notions of freedom during the Cold War, the intersection of domestic and foreign policies and politics, the construction of ideas about race, gender, and national identity, the politics of memory and the conflicted ways that the war has been remembered and commemorated. They then conducted oral history interviews and crafted websites to places these interviews into historical context.
View the Vietnam War Oral History Archive