Tag Archive

archives

Identifying and filling silences in a COVID-19 archive

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Editors’ Note: This is the third of three essays about the COVID-19 collaborative archiving project A Journal of the Plague Year: The COVID-19 Archive. The first essay introduces the project. The second provides insights into teaching the Archive. This one addresses issues related to archival silences. Read More

Incorporating labor history in a public history curriculum

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Grassroots protest and union activism have flourished in the decade since the Great Recession. Labor and working-class history has flourished, too, and is experiencing a resurgent interest among scholars and public historians alike. At our particular historical moment, shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests against state violence and white supremacy, labor history provides context for urgent contemporary concerns about public health, workplace health and safety, economic inequality, structural racism, and social welfare. Read More

John Lennon Slept Here: Looking for Fans in Public History

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As I stood in a small room on Menlove Avenue in Liverpool, England, that had belonged to John Lennon, I bopped my head along to the Del-Vikings song playing, looked out at the blue suburban skies, and imagined John Lennon there, doing his dreaming, in this room at his Aunt Mimi’s. Read More

Doin’ it for the Gram: How Baltimore’s Chicory Revitalization Project uses Instagram to Engage the Public

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Editor’s Note: This is the third and final post in a series on the Chicory Revitalization Project. The first post featured the history of the project and the second post considered digitization of the magazine. 

During its nearly twenty-year run, Chicory’s contributors detailed their lives, struggles, and dreams with candor—grasping at fragmented ancestral ties, growing up in the projects, and creating alternate futures for their city. Read More

Decolonizing the Digital Literary Canon through Digitizing “Chicory”

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Editor’s note: This is the second post in a three-part series on the Chicory Revitalization Project.   

In my first post in this series, I argued that Chicory, a community poetry magazine from Baltimore in the 1960s, could be a valuable resource for public historians seeking the perspectives of regular people, particularly working-class African American young people, about the tumultuous era they lived through. Read More

All Poetry to the People! Black Arts Movement Poetry as Public History

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Editor’s Note: This is the first post in a three-part series on Baltimore’s Chicory Revitalization Project. 

Following the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, black visual artists, writers, dancers, musicians, actors, and poets conceptualized themselves as part of the Black Arts Movement, a black nationalist political and aesthetic project. Read More