archives – African American History, Culture & Digital Humanities

Taking Care: The Question of AR, VR, and Blackness

Jessica Lu — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 16:00:11 +0000

I can’t breathe. At once: the wheezing out of a severely singular experience. Yet and also: a hailing of the social, political, economic, and environmental phenomena surrounding Eric Garner’s loss of breath. My dissertation, On Black Breath: A Theory and Praxis, undertakes a partial genealogy of breath as it has been racialized within the

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Standing Together Across Time and Space: Black Social Networks in Late Nineteenth Century Tennessee

Jessica Lu — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 16:00:28 +0000

On October 25, 1865, Henrietta Joyce and Elisha Helms stood before a clerk of the court of Davidson County, Tennessee, to confirm Henrietta’s marriage to her late husband, John Joyce. They appeared before the court in Henrietta’s effort to secure a Civil War widow’s pension based on her husband’s military service in the United

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Reimagining the Lives of Black Soldiers Wives and Widows in Post-Civil War America

Catherine Knight Steele — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:47:07 +0000

My book project, Her Claim for Pension is Lawful and Just, chronicles struggles of black women seeking benefits from the United States government on the basis of their standing as the wives and widows of the men who served in the Union army during the Civil War. By employing the resources and digital tools learned

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A (Re)Energizing Pedagogical Approach: Engaging Digital Tools to Teach African American Literature

Catherine Knight Steele — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 13:01:23 +0000

As an AADHum Scholar, one of my goals is to strengthen the connection between my research and teaching of 20th and 21st Century African American Literature. Drawing on work by Orrie Flores, David Green, Adam Banks, Bryan Carter, and Phill Branch, I have always encouraged my students to participate in literature through the creation of

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Understanding More by Seeing More: Reflections on Digitizing the AFL-CIO Archive

Catherine Knight Steele — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 17:29:59 +0000

How can the turn to the digital transform the archive into an active platform for creating, preserving, and transmitting knowledge? This is the question at the center of my research - and why the George Meany Memorial Archives records on Civil Rights in the US fascinate me. They help me see how archives can

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Hip Hop Archives: How Academia Preserves Rap Music’s Legacy

Catherine Knight Steele — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 19:39:18 +0000

AADHum’s final digital humanities incubator session last semester, entitled “Representing Movement”, explored how we can use GIS to document travel and movement. To prepare for the Incubator, the AADHum team decided to construct ea series of maps based on the lyrics of some of Atlanta’s most well-known rappers. We were motivated by an interest

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Confronting “the Witness”: Encoding Archives of Black Lives

Catherine Knight Steele — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 15:33:06 +0000

As a rhetorician, I am trained to analyze public discourse and the history of ideas. My critiques focus on “progressive” ideas—like freedom—that are leveraged by the state to codify exclusion, surveillance, and dehumanization of blackness and black people. As a graduate assistant to the AADHum initiative, I am exploring how I can engage with

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Civil Rights and Worker Rights: Digitizing Labor Archives

Catherine Knight Steele — Tue, 02 May 2017 13:00:02 +0000

Throughout the Spring 2017 semester, AADHum has been working to explore, digitize, and make accessible portions of the George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO archives, housed in the University of Maryland's Special Collections. Guided by a thematic focus on black labor, migration, and artistic expression, Graduate Assistant William Thomas reflects on his experiences, as well as the potential

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