digital history

What Happens When Kids Get Their History from Video Games?

Bret Devereaux is trying to lead fellow historians to understand the influence a number of popular strategy games have for students understanding of both historical fact and the "mechanics" of historical change. 

Teaching Slavery to Middle Schoolers Raises Emotions. It's Not a Bad Thing

by Mary Niall Mitchell and Kate Shuster

A new digital project helps teachers use advertisements seeking the return of enslaved people who escaped as a way of understanding the people whose self-liberation forced those stories into the printed record.

Expanding the Digital Black Atlantic

by Roopika Risam

Scholars who are bringing digital humanities work to the study of the African diaspora and the connections between Black people in Europe, Africa and the Americas are also mindful of the need to avoid perpetuating the gaps and omissions about historical Black experiences that characterize traditional archives.

Michigan State University Launches Online Database Chronicling North-Atlantic Slave Trade

Enslaved.org is a searchable database that contains millions of records representing enslaved Africans and their descendants.

Narratives and Counternarratives: Building Digital History Projects in the Classroom

by Allison Robinson

A PhD candidate reflects on building a class around primary source research for digital history, finding it "encouraged students to experiment with unfamiliar methodologies and new sources, challenging their historical thinking." 

A Massive New Effort to Name Millions Sold into Bondage during the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Historians Daryle Williams, Walter Hawthorne, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and David Eltis, along with Henry Louis Gates, are part of an interdisciplinary collaboration to create access to biographical and genealogical information about individual people enslaved in the United States. 

Online Lecture: Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home (11/2)

The George Washington DC Mondays series supports discussion with local authors and historians about the DC region. 

Dr. Carol Anderson: The 2020 Election and Beyond (video)

Historian Carol Anderson joins Merrittocracy host Keri Leigh Merritt to discus Trump, racism, and the state of democracy leading up to the 2020 election.

Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City (Virtual Lecture, 11/12/2020)

Urban historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz discusses the impact of Latino immigrants on revived urban centers in the late 20th century, sponsored by the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library. 

How We Lie to Ourselves About History

At its best, the "You're Wrong About" podcast transcends fact-checking and debunking to ask why so many of the stories we know are wrong, and why they persist nevertheless. 

Julia Rose Kraut: Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States

Julia Rose Kraut's "Threat of Dissent" examines major court decisions and legislation affecting the deportation of political radicals in the face of the First Amendment and America's stated ideals, while showing the lives of the people involved. She addressed the National History Center's Washington History Seminar this October.

CSUF Professor is Digitally Mapping the History of Gay Spaces in America

A new digital project by Eric Gonzaba and Amanda Regan maps out places listed in gay travel guides from the 1960s to the present, giving new insight into how gay people outside of tolerant cities created social spaces. 

Accuracy and Authenticity in a Digital City

by Anne Sarah Rubin

The technological capacity to render the city of the past in minute detail doesn't replace the work of interpreting and understanding how people lived in its spaces.

Washington History Seminar 10/2: Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1945-1962

The National History Center, The Woodrow Wilson Center and Politics & Prose Books prouldy host Martin Sherwin on Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1945-1962. Friday, October 2, 6:00 PM. 

Go Live in Another Decade. I Recommend It.

After 1960, much of history as many Americans experienced it — through popular culture on TV, on the radio and at the movies — is preserved and easily accessible online. With a few clicks around YouTube, history leaps into the present, often in ways that deepen and complicate the narrative.

Inside Journal of the Plague Year's COVID-19 Curatorial Collective

by Rebecca S. Wingo

Creating a public digital archive of the COVID pandemic isn't a simple undertaking. A public historian leading the effort discusses how it's developed and how to be involved. 

View the Library of Congress's 9/11 Web Archive

The Library of Congress's September 11, 2001 Web Archive is a vital resource for understanding the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks. 

Virtual Event: Martha S. Jones with Nikole Hannah-Jones (Tuesday, September 8)

The Harvard bookstore sponsors a virtual event featuring Martha S. Jones discussing her new book "Vanguard" and the role of Black women in securing political equality. Nikole Hannah-Jones will join the conversation.

The Urban History Association's Grad Student Blogging Contest is Beginning

The Urban History Association is preparing to showcase the best blogging by grad students. Check in next week to read. 

Read Thousands of Abraham Lincoln’s Newly Transcribed Letters Online

The missives, preserved by the Library of Congress, include notes to and from the beloved president.