This is a digital museum to accompany Drs. Margaret Peacock and Erik L. Peterson’s forthcoming book Journal of a Pandemic Year: Death Violence, and the Illusion of American Exceptionalism (Boston MA: Beacon Press) 2022.
This project allows visitors to choose a date to browse news stories, images, and daily entries written by Peacock and Peterson. Visitors can also submit their own stories to the website.
In Spring 2021, Dr. Jeri Wieringa’s REL120 class created a course website featuring exhibits and mapping to study religion and science in the 19th century, as well as learn digital methods and metadata best practices.
View Religion and Science: Creating Health in 19th Century U.S.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
View Music Politics
Knitting History is the result of a collabortive effort of the students in Professor Kopelson’s history class titled Handmade Nation: Knitting and History. Students compiled a timeline of significant moments in the history of knitting, as well as moments in which knitting impacted history. Additionally, students put their own knitting skills to the test, creating an exhibit of their own projects tied to history.
View Knitting History
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.
