Author Archives: men2022

Covid Memorial Quilt

The Covid Memorial Quilt is a living memorial to all those who have died from COVID-19. It began as a 7th grade community action project, “Young Change-Makers in a COVID-19 World.” Inspired by stories about the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which her mother worked on, student Madeleine Fugate chose to make a Covid Memorial Quilt as a way to publicly grieve, honor and recognize all those who have died.

Word spread and the Covid Memorial Quilt soon outgrew a school project. Individual Memorial Squares are sent in from all over the world by friends and families to honor a loved one. The Covid Memorial Quilt has now become a global project of hope and healing.

College of Staten Island Public History Coronavirus Chronicle

Organized by the History Department at the College of Staten Island (CUNY), this project seeks Staten Islanders from all walks of life to send in anything that will help tell the story of the health emergency in order to archive the what life has been like during the crisis. The project operates through the group’s Facebook page. Those who wish to submit pictures, videos, stories or documents can do so through the Facebook page or via email to: susan.smithpeter@csi.cuny.edu

An Oral History of Iowa’s Chinese Americans and Nationals Experiences during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This project, based at the University of Iowa, will conduct oral history research in three major towns in Iowa, including Ames, Iowa City, and Des Moines to collect the stories and testimony of Chinese nationals and immigrants and exhibit them to the general public.

Project members have already conducted interviews with several Chinese students on the campus and collected their stories fraught with frustrations and sadness. Integrated to the institutional oral history project operated by the University of Iowa Libraries, the team members of this research have collected oral history materials on the campus under the University Archivist of the University of Iowa (UI) David McCartney’s supervision. 

Infectious Historians

A podcast and blog created by historians Merle Eisenberg and Lee Mordechai, historians of disease, the environment, and medieval history. The podcast aims to both provide a flavor of past disease outbreaks while also discussing some pressing present questions. Some episodes discuss a historical pandemic as a way to give a sense of what has happened in the past to contextualize the present. Other episodes will feature experts to discuss specific aspects of disease from quarantine to disease modeling. Future episode arcs will include episodes with scholars on, for example, the forced vaccinations of slaves, black infant mortality, and LGBT rights during the HIV pandemic. The project also plans to expand coverage of historiographical debates and introduce additional diseases such as polio and Ebola.

The podcast argues for the importance of the past’s complexity and the contingent and structural forces that shape human responses to infectious disease outbreaks. It aims to showcase that the past does not offer simple lessons that can be taken from history and simply applied in the present.

Chippewa Valley Covid-19 Archive

In response to the pandemic, in spring 2020 the Public History Program and the McIntyre Library at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire joined with the Chippewa Valley Museum to launch the Chippewa Valley Covid-19 Archive, a rapid-response collection project to document the effects of the Coronavirus in rural Western Wisconsin. The archive is dedicated to preserving oral histories and materials related to Covid-19 and its impacts on the region, with the imperative to compile a diverse picture of its effects across our communities.

Documenting the Undocumented: Covid-19 Oral Histories & Immigrant Workers in Rural Wisconsin

“Documenting the Undocumented“ is a project at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire that seeks to collect and archive and make publicly available oral history interviews with Spanish-speaking populations in Western Wisconsin, particularly migrant and undocumented workers, many of whom work on dairy farms in the region. Documenting the experiences of Spanish-speaking, immigrant, and undocumented populations is an essential part of understanding the pandemic’s impacts in Wisconsin and the rural Midwest, as well as the intersections of race, power, and structural inequality that the crisis has highlighted.

This oral history project seeks to fill archival silences by preserving marginalized voices that have often been absent in historical sources and create a repository preserving a diverse cross section of experiences to help future scholars, students, and policymakers better understand the impact of Covid-19 on Wisconsin and the rural Midwest. 

Locked Down: An Oral History of the Covid-19 Virus in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle

“Locked Down: An Oral History of the Covid-19 Virus in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle” collects stories about how the global pandemic shapes the lives of people in vulnerable Appalachian communities. During the summer of 2020 Shepherd University students conducted and transcribed 27 interviews. Interviewees included students, faculty, and administrators, local teachers and students from grades K-12, community members and business owners, and local government officials. Audio and video from the interviews will be housed in the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education and the Historic Shepherdstown Commission and will be available to the public online.

Afterlives of Pandemics, Past & Present

“Afterlives of Pandemics, Past & Present” is an initiative of Beyond Better, an interdisciplinary, multi-media public medical humanities effort that seeks to destabilize ableist narratives in American healthcare through oral history, storytelling, and art. The project asks, what can we learn about health, illness, disability, and society by looking at the current experiences of COVID-19 survivors alongside the past experiences of polio survivors from the mid-twentieth century? Using oral history and digital archival research, and in conjunction with the artistic vision of two solicited artists with disabilities, the project will collect and curate stories of survival from the current COVID-19 pandemic and juxtapose them with stories of survival from the mid-twentieth century polio epidemic in the U.S. 

”Afterlives of Pandemics” will place stories of contemporary experiences into historical perspective and put them on our digital platforms at beyondbetter.org, and on our Instagram page (@thebeyondbetterproject). Original visual art works created by illustrators and animators from the disability community will help explore the experiences of interview participants. 

Using the analytical lens of disability history as a way to move beyond the dichotomy of sick/well, the project will curate a series of individual stories and artistic interpretations that capture the historical continuities and departures that characterize the experience of epidemic disease in the minutes, days, weeks, months, and years after they touch people’s lives. It draws attention to the ways in which the afterlife of an epidemic disease continues to shape life in both intimate and very public ways, from the level of the individual, to the community, to society at large. 

Anabaptist History Today

Anabaptist History Today (AHT) is a collaborative, community storytelling project with support from seventeen Anabaptist archives and history organizations in the United States and Canada.

Anabaptist History Today’s immediate goal is to create a historical snapshot of Anabaptist experiences during the unprecedented events of 2020 and following. AHT creates a crowdsourced mechanism to capture overlooked stories, documenting what individuals and communities are doing at the local level.

The Anabaptist community has a centuries-long history of using stories to strengthen the bonds of faith, practice, and identity across geographical space. AHT seeks to build upon that tradition by showcasing the diversity of the modern Anabaptist community and amplifying the voices of those often erased from the dominant historical narrative.

COVID-Calls podcast

COVID-Calls is a weekly public-facing podcast and historical archive project broadcast via Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and Periscope. Immediately following the live broadcast, the COVIDCalls episode is edited with music and breaks and archived as a podcast, made available via all major podcast platforms.

Created by Scott Gabriel Knowles of the Department of History, Drexel University, COVIDCalls aims to accomplish four goals: (1) Examining in depth topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic relevant to advancing public health, public engagement with history, public understanding of science, antiracism, and public engagement with high-quality social science/humanities research; (2) Amplification of relevant social science disaster research (broadly defined) conducted in the public interest, across disciplines, in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic; (3) Facilitating connectivity among disaster researchers and journalists/media professionals in order to bring high quality, in-depth social science into the hands of the working press; and (4) Collecting and disseminating a real-time historical archive of the COVID-19 pandemic as filtered through the lens of disaster research practitioners.