The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University is pleased to announce the launch of its first podcast. The Mozilla Digital Memory Bank Podcast will feature highlights from oral histories taken from current and former Mozilla employees. The biweekly show will cover a wide range of topics such as the open source development process, thoughts on the unique successes of Firefox, the cultural relationships between developers and volunteers, and comparisons between corporate and open source experiences.

The Mozilla Digital Memory Bank is a permanent, open, peer-produced digital archive of Mozilla history. With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, The Mozilla Digital Memory Bank collects and permanently preserves digital texts, images, audio, video, personal narratives, and oral histories related to Mozilla, its products, and its community of developers, testers, and users. Building on CHNM’s earlier work on the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank aims to create a lasting resource for generations of students, teachers, scholars, and members of the general public interested in the history of the Internet, open source software, and Mozilla.

Help preserve the history of Mozilla and Firefox by contributing your own stories, emails, chat transcripts and documents to the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank.

The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University is pleased to announce the launch of a new website: Probing the Past: Virginia and Maryland Probate Inventories, 1740-1810.

What was daily like life in the 18th century? For slaves? For slave owners? What objects did people use everyday for work, eating, or play? Probing the Past is a free website that allows users to explore these questions and many more. The site presents 325 probate inventories that were recorded between 1740 and 1810 in selected Virginia and Maryland counties. Resources include digitized copies and transcriptions of the inventories, keyword and advanced searches, browsing by decade and county, two in-depth interviews with scholars on how to analyze probate inventories, and three lesson plans.

Funded by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and completed in collaboration with Gunston Hall Plantation, Probing the Past uses material culture to illuminate the rituals and social relations of 18th-century families in Virginia and Maryland, as well as the region’s economy and connection to larger markets.

On January 5, 2007 at the American Historical Association’s Annual General Meeting, representatives from CHNM, including Roy Rosenzweig, Kelly Schrum, Kristin Lehner, and Sharon Leon accepted the James Harvey Robinson Prize for World History Matters (Co-Director, Mills Kelly was unable to attend).

The Robinson Prize was established by the AHA Council in 1978 and is awarded biennially for the teaching aid that has made the most outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history in any field for public or educational purposes. The prize committee noted that “the impressive depth and breadth of its primary sources, the comprehensive geographical scope and transnational approach, and the user-friendly site design will enable high school and college world history teachers and students to make use of the rich site resources to investigate the complexities of global history.”

This is the third time that CHNM was the recipient or co-recipient of the Robinson Prize. In 1994, CHNM was recognized for its work on the CD-ROM Who Built America?, which was produced by the American Social History Project at the City University of New York. In 2005, CHNM also shared the prize with ASHP for their joint work on the website, History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web.