http://www.flickr.com/photos/21053346@N00/291138653/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ha112/234233755/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/14574987@N00/241343007/ http://chnm.gmu.edu/exploring/19thcentury/alienmenace/index.php
November 7, 2006
Some links
October 20, 2006
Week 9 assignment
Dr. Kelly indicated that we would receive word about what to read up on for Tuesday’s class. I haven’t heard anything, have you?
Dr. Kelly, do you have any indication of what we should read for our visitor on Tuesday?
It certainly isn’t like I have nothing to do, but I want to be prepared.
Michelle
October 19, 2006
October 18, 2006
Munchen
Muchen is an article written in 1942 by my late grandmother, Elisabeth Gravely. I would love to share this with all of you.
My grandmother was an aspiring actress while growing up in England and always was inspired by the arts. She was casted in some early British films playing the roles of Bessie Surtees and Grace Darling. (I have looked fervently for copies of these movies, but I haven’t had any luck.)
She moved to America in the late 30’s-early 40’s to marry my late grandfather, Dr. William Gravely. While living in America she started her career as a freelance writer for The Post, and afterwards she subsequently became a famous local muralist, whose work was exhibited in such places as The Capitol Lodge and The Reeve Gouche (a once bustling restaurant located in Georgetown that played host to a number politicians.)
This is one of the few articles of hers that I found while conducting a search on Pro-Quest Research Database about a year ago. Thanks to Dr. Kelly’s History 312 class, I found out about this wonderful tool that led me to a gold-mine.
The fellow Karl that she speaks of was a suitor of hers. The story in my family is that when he visited my grandmother in England, he spent a lot of his time studying the British coast line while sailing with my great-grandfather. As it turns out, he was a spy for the Nazis – or at least this is how the story goes. In a letter written by my great-uncle Nory (or, as he calls himself both “Fish Taco” and “S32″…no, seriously) he mentions this account:
“I think my parents were afraid that E was going to marry Karl when she went on that Munich safari. Before that my Dad had taken Karl sailing on the Walrus all the way up the north east coast to Lindisfarne. Karl took continous photographs of the coastline – even when there was nothing to see except sand dunes. That puzzled everyone. Just recently I’ve been reading about Hitler’s invasion plans of England. The main Nazi thrust was of course to be in the south around Dover, but a divisionary strike was planned from Norway to exactly the northeast coastel area that Karl had been so busily documenting. Little did my Dad know that he was entertaining a spy!” -Nory a.k.a- “Fish Taco”, a.k.a- “S32″
Utopia: “Their Souls Are Forever Free”
Along the James River in Kingsmill lies a memorial site called Utopia. The memorial marks a spot around where twenty-five enslaved Africans and their descendants were buried:
“Researchers from the James River Institute of Archaeology discovered the remains of twenty-five enslaved Africans and their descendants located in a cemetary near the site at a slave quarters known as Utopia.
The land where the cemetary was situated was owned by the families of Colonel Thomas Pettus and later by James Bray.
It is estimated that they lived between the seventeenth century (ca 1690) and early eighteenth century (ca 1770). America was not yet a nation during their life time.
The remains of their bodies were moved to protect from further deterioration and are buried under this monument. Their souls are forever free.”
I have visited this site on many occasions while visiting our close family friends who live along the James River in Kingmill. Their house is situated about a hundred yards away from Utopia. This place is very dear to me, and when I visit our friends, I usually make it a point to walk down and visit Utopia. It’s a very peaceful place. I just go to sit and meditate.
Last night, I came across an archaeological database called the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery. The database devotes itself to helping people learn about the enslaved Africans living in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Carribean during the Colonial and Ante-Bellum periods. The database also has a big section with a lot of good background information on Utopia.
A nice feature of this database allows one to access artifact queries. An artifact query is a basic inventory of artifacts found at each site. In this sense, a viewer of this database can get an idea of the many possessions these people carried with them. The artifact query section is just one of the many queries that people can access at this database. Click here for more.
I’ll leave everyone with a few pictures that my dear friend, Sally Lewis, sent to me.
Utopia:
May their souls remain free forever.
Another historical goodie on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDqHjA8r6ks
Winston Churchill’s speech the day after the death of King George VI. But the really interesting aspect of this is that it not a simple mp3 file, but rather a video of the ‘78 of the speech distributed by His Master’s Voice (now known as HMV) spinning on the turntable.
Just thought I’d post this for your consideration,
James
October 15, 2006
The Lost Museum-Week 7
CHNM links to the City University of New York site “The Lost Museum” about P.T. Barnum’s house of entertainment. The site offers a broad survey of social history in the 19th century city, involving such areas as race relations, gender relations, working conditions, style/fashion and particularly interesting, documentation through the museum’s exhibits of American middle class attitudes toward the wider world that was beginning to become known at the popular level through the European colonial experience. (more…)
Teaching with the web– Neolithic archaeological web sites
This post was originally intended as a comment on Michelle’s post, which was very amusing and honest about her method. It can be illuminating to toss in a search term just to see what comes up. The Tax Museum piece was very funny, though I was not excited enough to visit. How about looking for a Death Museum? Then it got too long. I intended to share my experience looking for a very definite item to use in teaching (objective: give students quick and representative access to the actual sites to supplement the texts’ generalizations about the Neolithic period), namely Neolithic sites. This would satisfy the objectives of illustrating specific examples from history, illuminating “how do we know” about the period, and investigating “how do historians/archeologists find out about the past?”) I started with two important, far-flung neolithic sites, namely Catal Huyuk (Turkey) and Skara Brae (Orkney Islands, Scotland). (more…)
The 2 questions on Digital People’s contributions to knowledge and its communication
We were left with two questions at the end of the last class: (1) Whether the experience of working with digital archival sources is “the same” as working directly with the real thing in archives. (2) Assuming that competence in the digital realm has attained for its adepts the status of members of a sort of sub-culture, what can these adepts contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning that ordinary mortals from the “analog community” cannot. (1b or 2b)There is another possibility in this question, namely, can people who are competent in creating effective digital means of expression give voice to groups of people, or to objects and “voices” from the past that can make them speak, and hence bring them to the awareness of others who lack this competence.
The alternative extension of the question may illuminate the link between the two. (more…)
October 13, 2006
Those “more” tags.
I really tried to use that “insert ‘more’ tag” function and I’m not getting it right. Sorry to use up lots of page space. The big blank areas were supposed to be where the “more” tag was to go. I’ll have to ask someone how to do it right.