Weekly Round-Up of our Favorite Links

From Leah:

Be sure to read the recent New York Times’ City Room blog posts as CUNY historian and friend of the Project Josh Freeman answers readers’ questions about working-class history in New York City.  Read Dr. Freeman’s bio here, Part I here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

The Civil War Data 150 project, a collaborative project to “share and connect Civil War data across local, state and federal institutions during the sesquicentennial.” It’s exciting to imagine what possibilities this project might open up for tracing the stories of individual ordinary soldiers through the years of the Civil War.

Confession: I’m a map geek.  So I’m thrilled by the Visualizing Emancipation (Google Earth plug-in required) project, from the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond.  It plots data from official records, newspapers, letters and diaries to track how emancipation spread through the South in the last years of the Civil War.  The goal of the project is “to comprehend the patterns, proportions, and timing of emancipation, to see multiple forms of power in interaction in space and time” as “slavery [eroded]”.  Also be sure to check out this series of maps “Mapping Marriage and Migration in Emancipation-era Virginia,” which complements nicely our collection of visual and text sources showing how freedpeople acted on their freedom by reuniting their families.

I’m fascinated by–and undecided about–the annual reenactment of a 1946 lynching in Georgia.  This article considers the event, which its stagers hope will bring justice to the still un-prosecuted perpetrators, in the context of other types of historical re-enactment.  One of the victims of the lynching was a returning U.S. serviceman; President Truman later cited the death as the final force to desegregate the Armed Forces.  One re-enactor notes, “White folks love their Civil War reenactments, which is mainly one big fantasy about the Lost Cause being so noble, so why not reenact some real history for a change?”

From Aaron:

If you haven’t visited the New Media Lab lately, you can do so this Sunday from the comfort of your own living room. ASHP”s Andrea Ades Vásquez is featured and talks about her role as Managing director of the New Media Lab, in addition to some great student work which was shown at a spring 2009 meeting.  It can be seen at 8:00 am on 11/21 on CUNY TV (and will be repeated throughout the week).

In honor of the blackout that occurred at the Giants vs. Cowboys game at the New Meadowland Stadium it seemed appropriate to link to a write up the Bowery Boys did on the 1965 NYC Blackout. “Business as usual,” some of the pictures show as life just went on (and by the way, there was no birth rate spike nine months after the blackout). For more information check out the Blackout History Project.

and then I leave you with this as a final thought: a Thanksgiving menu from 1899.

Friday links will be on holiday next week, but will return in a couple weeks. Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Last 5 posts by ASHP Staff

• FDR's Tree Army [now on Vimeo] - March 13th, 2013
• December Roundup - December 19th, 2012