Tag: history

Game Archive

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Professor Erik Peterson (History) assigned his students to make a digital resource about the history of games and gaming in course HY300-001. The games considered range from the Royal Game of Ur (2500+ BCE) to Monopoly (1933), to video games such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and in the course of a compact May-mester, students wrote session reports documenting the experience of game play which they posted to this online archive. Research and Instructional Services Librarian Brett Spencer collaborated with Professor Peterson and the ADHC, furnishing a tailor-made bibliographic instruction session which taught students how to find appropriate secondary sources about different facets of the history of gaming.

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Early American History Project

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Heather Miyano Kopelson is creating a pedagogical project with her students in repeated iterations of HY107 American Civilization to 1877, exploring America’s history before permanent European settlement. The website houses student video projects on a particular facet of early American history, in addition to a student-generated webliography on different important topics in this field for use by other students and scholars in this field. Students have also taken a creative approach by designing their own historical monuments commemorating moments in this period of history which they determine to be of particular historical significance, and these are also displayed within this digital resource, and will continue to be augmented by students in future semesters.

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UA Composers Forum

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The Regional Composers Forum of the Southeastern Composers’ League was held annually at the University of Alabama from 1950 to 1970. The Forum was the brain child of two UA faculty members, Gurney Kennedy and Paul Newell, and its goal was to provide a venue for rehearsals, readings, and concerts of works by composers in the Southeast. The Forum also regularly featured well-known composers, including Lukas Foss, Vincent Persichetti, Ross Lee Finney, Norman Dello Joio, and many others. In the spring of 2016, Dr. Linda Cummins and the students in her graduate music history seminar, MUS 626, undertook an online project to document the history of the Forum.  They brought together materials held by the Hoole Special Collections Library and conducted research on the composers who attended the Forum over the years. The project, when complete, will illuminate a fascinating aspect of music history in the southeastern United States in the mid-twentieth century.

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“To See Justice Done”: Letters from the Scottsboro Boys Trials

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More than eighty years ago, on March 25, 1931, nine young African Americans hopped a train in a Chattanooga freight yard and headed west to seek work. Instead, they found themselves joined together at the center of a life and death courtroom drama, falsely accused of rape. The Scottsboro Boys’ cases focused an international spotlight on Jim Crow in America in the 1930s. In 2013, Alabama legislators passed two bills, acknowledging that the men were “victims of a gross injustice.” One, a resolution, exonerated the nine defendants; and the other created a law making it possible to grant posthumous pardons to the Scottsboro defendants. Part of the Scottsboro Boys Museum University-Community partnership, this digital project aims to create a curated online repository of letters about the Scottsboro Boys Trials sent to Alabama governors during the 1930s from a wide range of correspondents to shed new light on these pivotal historical events.

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Carte de Visite Project

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The Southern Cartes de Visite Collection is a recently-digitized group of 3,356 photographs from circa 1850 to 1900 from the A. S. Williams III Americana Collection. The ADHC was part of a larger collaboration within the University Libraries to create a digital map depicting the locations of photographers, studios, and galleries represented within the collection of cartes de visite, creating an interface in which users can browse the collection geographically, or filter it by photographer. Users can also access a link to the Acumen database to see and manipulate the cartes de visite photographs. The cartes-de-visite, or “visiting cards,” are part of the A.S. Williams III Americana Collection at The University of Alabama. The photographs represent an impressive range of southern studios during a time when the prints were the most popular and inexpensive form of portrait photography. Small (2 1/2 by 4 1/2) albumen images mounted on cardstock, cartes-de-visite allowed customers to quickly and easily share photographs with friends, family, and colleagues. Many prominent and lesser-known photographers are represented, and the collection serves as a valuable resource for historians of the South, genealogists, and the general public.

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Black Belt 100 Lenses

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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.

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Vietnam War Oral History Archive

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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.

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George C. Rable Civil War Indexes

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On this website is a set of indexes to published primary sources (books and periodicals) dealing with the American Civil War that I have created over the past fifteen years or so. This began when I was on the road a great deal and so would take along collections of letters or diaries to examine for various research projects.  I began noting items that might be of future use to my students or myself but soon expanded the scope to create rough subject indexes for each volume or article. Included is material from soldiers and civilians, Union and Confederate, items produced by a single individual as well some more general compilations.  At this point the collection includes over one thousand book indexes and a large number of indexed articles.  The collection is growing, and I plan on making continuous additions.

View the George C. Rable Civil War Indexes