Tag Archive

popular culture

Digital public history as folk music hootenanny: Part 3—Toward a multimodal Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project

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The Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project, discovered in the silent archives of Northwestern University Libraries Special Collections repository (Part one) and digitally developed through collective effort (Part two), now features a fully-searchable, open-source online archive and a digital exhibit that introduces themes and materials to aficionados and newcomers alike. Read More

Digital public history as folk music hootenanny: Part 2—How we created the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project

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The Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project began with silence. The question became how to activate its noisy past for a broader public when its history only remained in the quiet corners of the archive. The path forward would require not one solitary scholar in the stacks, as with a traditional historical research project, but many participants bringing out the voices, music, and sensory experiences from the repository. Read More

Digital public history as folk music hootenanny: Part 1—Finding the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project

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This three-part series proposes that digital public history can deepen our study of the American folk music revival and cultural history in the United States. Conversely, it also contends that the folk music revival—with its hootenanny sing-alongs and sense of collective action—offers intriguing democratic models for digital public history. 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

Public history on Broadway (Part 2)

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My recent review of the Georgia Social Studies Standards, as part of my work at the Museum of History and Holocaust Education, galvanized my desire to reflect on the importance of the Broadway musical, Allegiance, which tells the story in fictionalized form of George Takei’s family’s experience in internment camps during World War II. Read More