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:
Picture 1.
Picture 2.
Picture 3.
May their souls remain free forever.
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
This was a tough weekend. I usually find time on Friday and Saturday to do the study and reading for this class. But this past Friday and Saturday I was fixing the server that this website lives on.
It just brings home one more point. Books will be used forever. Long after the last plug on a server is pulled, long after the data on a hard drive becomes unreadable due to incompatible hardware, the book will be there. Just like it always has. It can’t be turned off, it can’t be hacked. Anyhow, despite that bit of anti-technical rant, I’ll endeavor to expound on the qualities of a few websites.
Historical Thinking Matters, Do History, and Morning Sun.
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Posting Update – Third time must be a charm — Ammon,on my second attempt to post the site was completely down from (7:00 PM – 8:43 PM)
I chose to evaluate two websites from a design perspective. By doing so, I hoped to learn the material of the sites, as well as discover ease of use and if the sites provided creative elements that want me to explore what information and tools are contained within each site.
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World History Sources
Just a minor formatting issue, but the homepage does not fit entirely onto my screen, and there seems to be a great deal of empty space which could be used more effeciently.
This is a remarkable site. There is very little about which I can be critical. The scholarly reviews about the online primary sources alone is an incredible resource. Well organized and sorted by both geographic region, and chronology, I only wish I knew about this site during my undergrad degree! But there is so much more on this website. A guide to unpacking evidence from various types of sources, examples of historians analysing sources, and case studies on how 16 teachers have taught with primary sources. This an amazing resource for both teacher of history, and students, although perhaps below the university level, but then again, it is available to anyone, and that is one of the benefits of the internet. (more…)
Much of the excitement surrounding digital history is its great flexibility. Not only does new media offer multimedia capabilities, changing what content might easily be presented to students, but it also is adaptable to any age group. The ability to quickly and effectively incorporate images and sound, with or without the use of textual narration allows younger students the opportunity to engage visual material they might find more approachable, while older students can appreciate the connectivity between objects and the open-ended possibilities of the Web. (more…)
I first examined the World History Matters and History Matters projects sponsored by the Center for History and New Media looking for shortcomings. Although failing in this initial endeavor, as I found no glaring deficiencies, I learned to appreciate these projects as models for incorporating technology not just into learning history, but teaching as well. From these two model databases I have decided that three essential requirements must be met in order to have a useful digital history project. Firstly, as in all good academic history primary sources must form the backbone of your project. They must be available for students and other site visitors to interact with, by listening, reading or watching. Secondly, there must be a mechanism through which site visitors are guided to historical thought. This mechanism could be as complex as an interactive game or as primitive as simply posting a few samples of how historians think about sources. Lastly, a good project will emphasize teaching as well as learning. Well developed sites will supply teachers with exercises, assignments or questions to pose to their students. Recognizing that educators provide the historical context for student learning makes this requirement all the more important in creating a successful digital history project. (more…)
These two projects are quite different. It is hard to find any weaknesses in DoHistory or WH Sources, except that they and the other projects on the CHNM site ought to have more revealing and clear titles–that seems to me the signal weakness in the suite of projects as a group. They are all excellent, but their titles can be confusing and too generic. It might be a function of titles chosen before the sites were fully developed in content and scope. DoHistory, for example, might have been envisioned to house a future project along the lines of the Martha Ballard Diary resources, but it is alone in the category now, so it should have its own title, or attach a subtitle. The site is so remarkable an example of a unique digital history resource that its title should not be generic, because people can’t easily find it. It does come up on a search, but not on a browse of chnm. (More on DoHistory below). On the other hand, World History Sources, which I visited on an earlier occasion, used to be a list like a WH version of the Webography resource collection (annotated rather than reviewed, I recall). Now it could be “Historical Thinking Matters,” or “History Matters,” or “DoHistory.” Nothing is distinctively different enough about these titles. (more…)
Up to this point in the course, we have learned how digital technology has re-shaped the traditional pedagogy of historians. Digital media as a tool for learning has made information more accessible and readily available for the historian. This post will look at a few of the projects that the Center of History and New Media at GMU has worked on in the past, as well as analyze their strengths and weaknesses…(well mostly strengths.)
The first project that we will look at is called World History Sources and is located at this link: World History Sources. Upon first glance, the site looks very easy to navigate. There is not a lot of clutter, which makes a world of difference when trying to access the various sources one would need to conduct research. For instance, the links on the main page of the website provide access to more specific information. This is very helpful when doing research for an essay because the user does not have to sift through a lot of pointless information just to find something on say, Trade in World History. What is also quite effective about the website is that it offers interactive multimedia features to help one analyze specific aspects of World History, such as music. By actually hearing and seeing the music played, the historian may arrive at a better analytical interpretation of the music, as opposed to just reading about what’s being played. The ease at which one can navigate this site also matched with the interactive features makes World History Sources a full-fledged winner. (more…)
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…)
