Promised Land

May 25, 2013 By Sara Georgini in Academia, From the Archives, Historiography, Interview, Methodology, Pedagogy, Technology, Uncategorized Tags: American West, Constitution, constitutional law, Digital History, frontier, law, legal studies 1 Comment

“Saint Louis in 1846”
Henry Lewis

This week, The Junto spoke with Lea VanderVelde, the Josephine R. Witte Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law, a Guggenheim Fellow in Constitutional Studies, and principal investigator of the Law of the Antebellum Frontier project, which “seeks to digitally analyze the legal and economic mechanisms at work on the American frontier in the early 1800s.” She kindly took our questions on her work-in-progress, and why digital research transforms the early American legal history of how the West was run. Continue reading →

Digital Dissertation Workshop

March 29, 2013 By Sara Georgini in Interview, Public History Leave a comment

Amid the whirl of data visualization, digital pedagogy, network analysis, text mining projects, and big data vs. small data debates that energized Boston’s inaugural “Days of Digital Humanities” conference last week, The Junto caught up with three early Americanists using new media to complete traditional dissertation work: Erin Bartram (University of Connecticut), Jean Bauer (University of Virginia), and Lincoln Mullen (Brandeis University). Here’s what they had to say about the process, and how digital research will shape their work after the dissertation. Continue reading →

Spring at the “History Harvest”

March 6, 2013 By Sara Georgini in Interview, Public History Tags: Digital History, digital humanities, people's history, Public History 5 Comments

Currier & Ives, 1849

This week, we talk to University of Nebraska-Lincoln historians William Thomas and Patrick Jones, co-directors of History Harvest, a community-based approach to creating a new people’s history of America online using the real “stuff” of our past.

JUNTO: How did you get the idea (and support) for History Harvest? What are the goals of “community-based history,” and how is it a model for the profession?

THOMAS: The original idea for me goes all the way back to my work on The Valley of the Shadow Project in the mid-1990s with Ed Ayers and Anne Rubin. We ran a small community history harvest in that project, but neither the public awareness of digitization nor the technical infrastructure to do large scale digitization on site were available. Still ever since then, I have been interested in expanding the idea. And we have seen in every digital history project that the community often comes forward with materials to contribute. So in 2010 we started The History Harvest Project here at the University of Nebraska. Continue reading →

Tracing the Path of “American Journeys”

February 22, 2013 By Sara Georgini in Interview, Public History Tags: Digital History, Wisconsin Historical Society Leave a comment

Edwin James, “An Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1819, 1820.”

Still searching for new sources to use in your survey, or maybe a new midwinter project to research? The Wisconsin Historical Society’s American Journeys site is a hub for 18,000 pages’ worth of diaries, eyewitness accounts, manuscripts, images, and travel narratives of exploration and settlement in North America– all set in a timeline that stretches from the Vikings to the Rockies. Michael Edmonds, Head of Digital Collections & Web Services in the Library-Archives Division of WHS, told us how the site has transformed the research process, on both sides of the library desk. Continue reading →

The “Extra-Illustrated” Man: NYPL’s Emmet Archive

February 15, 2013 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Interview, Public History Tags: Interview, NYPL, Public History 2 Comments

When more than 10,000 early American documents find new life in the digital world, we at The Junto want to know more about the challenges and opportunities of the project. Thomas Lannon, Assistant Curator of the Manuscripts and Archives Division at the New York Public Library, kindly took our questions on Thomas Addis Emmet’s extra-illustrated archive. Continue reading →

Forgotten Giant: Restoring Simms

February 8, 2013 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Interview, Public History Tags: Archives, Digital History, South 3 Comments

"Washington Irving and His Literary Friends at Sunnyside." Simms stands, leaning against the chair, center left.

“Washington Irving and His Literary Friends at Sunnyside.” Simms is seated at the left end of the table, shown in full profile.
(Christian Schussele, Oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1864)

Meet a Southern man of letters, William Gilmore Simms, through his life’s work of literature—much of it now available in the form of free, digital editions thanks to the Simms Intitiatives at the University of South Carolina. A well-known editor, critic, poet and historian of Southern life and culture in his day, Simms (1806-1870) occupies a unique position in early American literature, and (re)introducing him to modern readers has presented new challenges for scholars. The Junto asked the Initiatives’ Todd Hagstette, Simms Curator, to talk about creating a digital portrait of the author, and why Simms’s work belongs on the syllabus. Continue reading →

Some Thoughts on Teaching: An Interview with James H. Merrell

February 6, 2013 By Rachel Herrmann in Interview, Interviews with Historians, Pedagogy, Special Features Tags: Historians, Interview, pedagogy 14 Comments

I first met Jim Merrell in the spring of my sophomore year at Vassar College, when I registered for his Revolutionary America class. Over the next two and a half years I took several more courses with Mr. Merrell (professors at Vassar go by “Mr.” or “Ms.,” rather than “Dr.” or “Professor”), where I received multi-page responses to my essays, and comments on my research papers with words like “Huzza!”

Eventually, I began work on my senior thesis, which he kindly agreed to supervise. During the course of that year he met with me weekly to check on my progress with research and writing. His feedback was thoughtful but tough—after receiving his comments on the first full draft, I recall needing to go to the gym to run, lift, and then swim before being able to read them calmly. His assurance “that the draft gets critical treatment that is closer to graduate school than to first or second year college. (Huzza, sez you!)” should indicate the substance of his remarks [1]. Continue reading →

Early America, with a Brooklyn Accent

January 19, 2013 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Interview, Public History, Technology Tags: Brooklyn Historical Society, Digital History, Interview, museums, New York City Leave a comment

Last week, we asked how digital projects are transforming our study of early American life and culture. Here’s the first in a series of interviews with historians who tell us what worked, how digital tools shaped the narrative, and where they want to go next on the digital frontier. This week, we asked the Brooklyn Historical Society for a peek at the making of a special digital exhibit on the Lefferts family of New York. As Breuckelen becomes Brooklyn, readers can link to local sites where the Lefferts family lived and worked, including the Lefferts Historic H omestead in Prospect Park (shown here: Historical re-enactors gathering on the front steps in 1938). The Leffertses were influential landowners, politicians, historians, financiers—and also one of the county’s biggest slaveholding families. Their letters, farm accounts, and recipe books offer a new and very personal window on New York’s development.Our thanks to Jacob Nadal, the Director of Library and Archives, and Julie Golia, Public Historian and Curator, who kindly took our questions on bringing nearly four centuries of Brooklyn to digital life. Continue reading →

Interviews with Historians: Edwin G. Burrows

December 19, 2012 By Michael D. Hattem in Interview, Interviews with Historians, Special Features Tags: academia, Edwin G. Burrows, Interview, interviews with historians, New York City, pedagogy, Senior Historians 7 Comments

Edwin G. Burrows, Brooklyn College

Note: This post initiates one of our first special features, “Interviews with Historians.” The series is meant to give established historians a chance to discuss their work and share their thoughts on a range of topics with the next generation of early Americanists. The Junto would especially like to thank Ted Burrows for agreeing to be the subject of the series’ first interview.

Edwin G. Burrows is the Pulitzer-Prize winning co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, a narrative history covering the city’s founding by the Dutch through consolidation. After receiving his BA from the University of Michigan in 1964, Burrows received his PhD from Columbia University in 1972, where he worked with Eric McKitrick. Soon thereafter, he took a position in the History Department at Brooklyn College, where he has remained for the last forty years. Over the course of two decades, he co-wrote Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 with fellow Columbia PhD, Mike Wallace, which won them the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1999. In 2008, his second book, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War, was published by Basic Books and won the 2009 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award for the best book written each year on the American Revolution. In the interest of full disclosure, Ted served as my “faculty mentor” in the CUNY Baccalaureate Program for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies. Continue reading →