About

Miner's Son, Miners' Photographer presents the life and work of George Harvan, whose photographs document five decades of industrial decline of the mining communities around Lansford, Pennsylvania and the Panther Valley. After the mid-1960s Harvan’s interests expanded and the photographs and oral history presented here also document his later creative projects. His work serves as a useful reminder of the power of media to preserve history, as well as expand our understanding of people's stories through photography. Thomas Dublin was responsible for the oral history prepared here, the selection and organizing of the photographs employed, and for the historical essay which ties together the oral history and photographic sources. Melissa Doak designed the original presentation and with the assistance of John Hagan of the SUNY Binghamton Computer Center figured out how to present the images in the exhibition portion of the project and to accompany the historical essay and oral history transcripts. The current version has by necessity had to rework the original project design. Viewers interested in the original presentation can find it at the Journal for Multimedia History-vol. 3, 2000

We present the current version of the project with a view to assuring its preservation and to reaching a broader audience. This second edition of Miner’s Son, Miners’ Photographer includes:

Introductions to the various sources of the website-primarily still images, transcripts and recorded conversations with George Harvan, and a two-part historical essay.

Collections of the various themes and subjects central to Harvan's career.


Project Team

Thomas Dublin is Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York at Binghamton and the author of When the Mines Closed: Stories of Struggles in Hard Times, an oral history of industrial decline in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. After the completion of this multimedia project, he co-authored with Walter Licht, The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century (Cornell University Press, 2005). The book was co-winner of the 2006 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians and winner of the 2006 Philip S. Klein Prize of the Pennsylvania Historical Association. He can be reached at tdublin@binghamton.edu.

Melissa Doak was Associate Director of the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York at Binghamton as she completed this project. Her 1999 doctoral dissertation explored women's sexual deviance and institutional psychiatry in New York City between 1890 and 1920. She is now a free-lance editor and author in Ithaca, New York. She can be reached at mdoak@writeonwriting.com.


Credits and Acknowledgements

Permission to reprint copyrighted text or photographs is gratefully acknowledged. Our thanks to: Anthracite Heritage Museum, Scranton, Penn.; Bill Bamberger; Cornell University Press; Earl Dotter; George Harvan; Library of Congress. For skilled technical assistance and programming, our thanks to: Binghamton University; State University of New York; Carol Bell; Tom Blake; Jeff Donahue; John Hagan; Stan Kauffman; The Journal for MultiMedia History; Jane Ladouceur; Marianne Rahn-Erickson.

A special thanks to the anonymous readers of The Journal for MultiMedia History and to Gerald Zahavi and Susan McCormick for outstanding editorial support throughout the conception and execution of the original version of this complex project. Thanks also to Rwany Sibaja for an outstanding job of taking a complex, one-of-a-kind project and enabling it to fit within the programming and presentation of the Omeka open source web-publishing platform.


Omeka Project Team

Kelly Schrum is the Director of Educational Projects at Center for History and New Media and an Associate Professor in the Higher Education Program at George Mason University. Schrum received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and is the author of Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture, 1920-1950 (2004; paperback 2006). Schrum is the Principal Investigator and co-director for the National History Education Clearinghouse and many history education websites, including Children and Youth in History, and she is associate director for History Matters. Schrum has served as the Academic Program Director on multiple Teaching American History grants and has worked extensively in the areas of 20th-century American culture, new media, and teacher training.

Rwany Sibaja is a doctoral student in history at George Mason University, previously serving as a high school teacher and as a school-district social studies program manager for grades K-12 in Winston-Salem, NC. At GMU, he is focusing on issues of cultural identity in modern Argentina through the lens of soccer, and how cultural history and new media approaches can authentically engage students in the curriculum.