This past week CLAW Director Sandy Slater interviewed Dr. Victoria Barnett-Woods about her new edited collection, Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World: Objects and Capital in the Transatlantic Imagination (2020). Dr. Victoria Barnett-Woods is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola University Maryland. To access this interview please use the following link: https://cofc.zoom.us/rec/share/Rek2Sl5rJD3H
The Avery Digital classroom is back with their weeklong event series: Black Women Warrior Week!
All event links are posted in their Instagram Bio: @AveryResearchCenter.
The Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/) is an online exhibitions platform hosted by the Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL) in partnership with the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW), College of Charleston-Citadel Graduate College Master of Arts in History Program, and the College of Charleston Race and Social Justice Initiative. We are pleased to offer the following announcements and updates:
New Online Exhibitions:
As of May 2016, LDHI features nineteen online exhibitions that highlight underrepresented histories in the Lowcountry region and interconnected Atlantic World, with many more in progress. Our latest exhibitions include:
A Tribute to the Mother Emanuel Church
http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/mother-emanuel-tribute
Project Partners: Co-curated by Lowcountry Africana, the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, and the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center in partnership with the Mother Emanuel Church.
This online tribute documents local, statewide, and national responses to the tragic mass shooting that took place at the Emanuel AME Church, also known as Mother Emanuel, in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015. Through photographs from a range of sources, this visual account reveals an overwhelming outpouring of emotion and grief for the victims, survivors, and their families, as well as powerful efforts in the weeks and months following the shooting to address racial injustice and violence. Published May 2016.
Avery: The Spirit That Would Not Die, 1865-2015
http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/avery
Project Partners: The College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture
2015 marked the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Avery Normal Institute and the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Avery Research Center at the College of Charleston. This online exhibition explores over one hundred and fifty years of Avery history—from its origins as a school for Black Charlestonians starting in 1865, to its current form as a center for promoting the history and culture of the African diaspora with an emphasis on Charleston and the South Carolina Lowcountry. Published May 2016.
Charleston’s Cotton Factory, 1880-1900
http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/charlestons-cotton-factory
Project Author: Susan Millar Williams, Trident Technical College
This exhibition traces the history of the cotton factory in Charleston, South Carolina, from 1880 to 1900, and examines how mill workers—black and white, male and female—struggled for better working conditions in the contentious political, social, and economic contexts of the late nineteenth century. Published December 2015.
Liverpool’s Abercromby Square and the Confederacy During the U.S. Civil War
http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/liverpools-abercromby-square
Project Authors: Christopher Williams, Jim Powell, and Joseph Kelly, University of Liverpool
This exhibition explores connections between the U.S. South and Great Britain during the American Civil War, particularly through trading activities led by a group of influential businessmen who lived in Liverpool’s Abercromby Square. Despite widespread popular opinion against slavery by the mid-eighteenth century in Great Britain, the fortunes of this elite neighborhood were still intricately tied to the fate of the Confederacy. Published December 2015.
New Partnerships – Race and Social Justice Initiative: go.cofc.edu/rsji
In late June 2015, the Avery Research Center, Addlestone Library, African American Studies, and the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI) at the College of Charleston received a major grant from Google to launch the Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI) in response to recent tragic events in the Charleston area, including the shooting death of Walter Scott by a police officer in April 2015 and the mass shooting at the Emanuel AME Church in June 2015. With this support, RSJI is working with numerous partners to facilitate public events, exhibitions, and various projects that promote awareness of the history and ongoing struggles of racial injustice in Charleston, South Carolina, and throughout the United States.
Thank you to our 2015-2016 Graduate Students!
Special thanks to our graduate assistants from the College of Charleston-Citadel Graduate College Joint Master of Arts in History Program: Monica Bowman, Ciera Gordon, Jamie Mansbridge, and Leah Worthington. They’ve done wonderful work with LDHI, and best of luck to our graduates!
Help us share:
LDHI hopes to be a growing resource in the Charleston area and beyond. Please feel free to share LDHI in the classroom, on websites and social media, or through public talks or programming. Follow the Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL) on Twitter and Facebook for more LDHI and LCDL updates!
We’d love to hear from you:
We are interested in your feedback! Please contact Project Coordinator Amanda Noll (nolla@cofc.edu) or Co-Director Mary Battle (battlemp@cofc.edu) with any comments, suggestions, or questions you have about current and future LDHI projects, including new project partnerships.
New Website Helps Researchers Locate Reconstruction-Era Records for African American Genealogy and History
For Immediate Release
Contacts:
Angela Walton-Raji (angelaw859@aol.com)
Toni Carrier (toniheadr@aol.com)
Did you know that the majority of Freedmen’s Bureau records are now digitized and available online for free? Did you know that there are also digitized images of the records of other institutions that served newly-freed African Americans during Reconstruction, such as the Freedman’s Savings and Trust?
Angela Walton-Raji and Toni Carrier have built a new website called “Mapping the Freedmen’s Bureau – An Interactive Research Guide” (www.mappingthefreedmensbureau.com) to assist researchers in locating and accessing records of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Freedmen’s hospitals, contraband camps and Freedman’s Bank branches.
Researchers can use the website’s interactive map to learn which of these services were located near their area of research interest. If the records are online, the map provides a link to the records that tell the stories of newly-freed former slaves in the United States. The site also maps the locations where African Americans who served in the United States Colored Troops (USCT) fought in battle.
The goal of this mapping project is to provide researchers, from the professional to the novice, a useful tool to more effectively tell the family story, the local history and the greater story of the nation during Reconstruction.
“Mapping the Freedmen’s Bureau – An Interactive Guide” is available at http://www.mappingthefreedmensbureau.com.
The Penn Center hosted an inaugural Civil Rights Symposium in November to mark its 152th anniversary on St. Helena Island, just outside Beaufort, South Carolina. This symposium attracted veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, scholars, and community partners to the Penn Center’s storied campus of wooden structures and Spanish Moss-laden live oaks. Civil Rights activists such as Millicent Brown, Connie Curry, Jim Campbell, Myrtle Glascoe, Chuck McDew, Bob Moses, Cleveland Sellers, Hank Thomas, and many others gathered to celebrate and discuss the Penn Center’s history with Civil Rights in South Carolina. The symposium also addressed the continuous need to ensure that all Americans have access to quality education and equal citizenship.
A central question of the two-day event was how to make the history of the Civil Rights Movement struggle relevant to young people today. As an example, one panel discussed the upcoming collaborative digital exhibition, “Somebody Had to Do It:” A History of Desegregation in South Carolina. Dr. Millicent Brown and Dr. Jon Hale are partnering with the Avery Research Center and the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI) to create an online exhibition that incorporates the stories of the primary actors of the movement to desegregate schools. This digital exhibition seeks to showcase experiences of the “first children” to desegregate schools through oral history videos as well as interactive maps and timelines to tell the history of desegregation in the students’ own words.
Drawing from personal experience, Dr. Brown spoke eloquently about the hopes as well as the unintended consequences that came with school desegregation. Brown noted those directly involved in desegregation “thought it would be important to get kids together, to expose them to the same information, and close the gap of achievement.” She as well as others had faith that transforming education would transform mindsets, communities, and ultimately the country. Yet, as a result of desegregation, many African-American schools shut down and many African-American teachers lost their positions in the community. Brown wants to honor those first children to desegregate schools while also placing their sacrifices into the proper, and complex historical context. Working with LDHI, Brown said that she and other first children are “so grateful for where the technology has taken us and for the ability to share with everyone our story, especially the young people.” Ciera Gordon, a graduate student at the College of Charleston helping to create the online exhibition, said, “watching [the oral history] videos, you can see how therapeutic the interview sessions were for people still dealing with their pent up stories.” Brown concluded, “The beauty of it is that it will be shared worldwide.” Look for the upcoming LDHI exhibition, “Somebody Had to Do It:” A History of Desegregation in South Carolina, in 2015.
Collecting archival documentation about the first students to desegregate schools is ongoing and you can submit information to Aaron Spelbring, spelbringap@cofc.edu, Manager of Archival Services at the Avery Research Center.
Post by Harry Egner, College of Charleston
Graduate Assistant with the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative
The Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI) is a digital public history project hosted by the Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL) at the College of Charleston. Funded through a pilot project grant from the Humanities Council of South Carolina and a major grant award from the Dorothy and Gaylord Donnelley Foundation, LDHI began development in 2013 and launched in 2014 as a digital consultation service, scholarly editorial resource, and online platform for partner institutions and collaborative scholars to translate multi-institutional archival materials, historic landscape features and structures, and scholarly research into digital public history exhibition projects.
In partnership with the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture and the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program (CLAW), a major goal within LDHI’s mission is to encourage projects that highlight underrepresented race, class, gender, and labor histories within the Lowcountry region, and in historically interconnected Atlantic World sites. We believe digital interpretation can play a major role in helping to articulate the diverse histories of the Lowcountry and Atlantic World’s historic landscapes and structures. Collaborating with local archives, libraries, and museums, LDHI also strives to interpret and enhance access to regional resources by synthesizing exhibits that draw upon archival collections from multiple institutions.
LDHI now features thirteen exhibitions, with many exciting projects on the horizon. We hope to see the project grow through new digital history exhibits and increased educational outreach. Please visit the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative to view all current exhibitions. (http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/). LDHI’s exhibits can be useful resources for your own work, including research, classroom curriculum, and public educational outreach. We encourage you to explore all of LDHI’s online exhibitions and consider the site as digital resource that will grow and change over time.
In addition, the LDHI team is excited to welcome Harry Egner, Ciera Gordon, and Rachel Morse as new LDHI Graduate Assistants from the College of Charleston-Citadel’s Joint M.A History Program.
Finally, as a new digital project, we are actively working to expand and improve LDHI. For questions about LDHI, or to learn more about how you can develop a project or collaborate with the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, please contact LDHI Project Coordinator Amanda Noll, nolla@cofc.edu or Co-Director Dr. Mary Battle, battlemp@cofc.edu.
On Thursday, January 31st, Dr. Colin Wilder gave a presentation to the faculty and staff of the Addlestone Library on the role of digital humanities in the library. Dr. Wilder is the Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of South Carolina, and he received his PhD in German history from the University of Chicago. His presentation, “Developments in Digital Humanities Between Library and Classroom,” outlined how this growing field increasingly finds a home in academic libraries to foster a wide range of interdisciplinary digital projects. He also outlined how medium-sized to small academic libraries can particularly benefit from projects that use various types of open source (or at least cost-effective) software programs. Wilder emphasized that when libraries embrace digital humanities centers and projects, from literature data-mining projects to online public history exhibitions, this helps encourage academic libraries to become a creative space as well as an information repository.
For more information on the role of digital humanities in academic libraries, check out the following links:
What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in the Library?
by Micah Vandegrift
Digital Humanities and the Library
by Miriam Posner
Handwritten obituary for Nathaniel Heyward, killed in the Second Battle of Bull Run, August 29, 1862, perhaps written for publication.
Heyward and Ferguson Family Papers, 1806-1923
Visit the Lowcountry Digital Library for more information and more digital resources!
