Category Archives: Media

To document the cascade of public health, social, and financial crises set in motion by COVID-19, the Archives of American Art created an oral history series that recorded responses to the global pandemic across the American art world. Conducted virtually, the Pandemic Oral History Project features eighty-five short-form interviews with a diverse group of artists, teachers, curators, and administrators. Averaging twenty-five minutes long, each interview provides a firsthand account of and urgent insights into the narrator’s triumphs and tragedies in the summer of 2020. With more than thirty hours of recorded video and audio, the series bears witness to an unprecedented era as it unfolded in real time. Interviews are available on the project’s website and YouTube channel, as well as a podcast series on ITunes.

The Plague Year

The Plague Year is an episode of the Northeastern University Libraries podcast What’s New, hosted by Dan Cohen, posted on March 16, 2021. Cohen interviews Jim McGrath, one of the curators of The Journal of the Plague Year, which has been collecting stories and digital artifacts of the past twelve months.

Pandemic Perspectives: Stories Through Collections

The National Museum of American History’s Pandemic Perspectives series of online programs presents curators, historians, and topic specialists in engaging panel discussions offering perspectives on the current pandemic. Panelists virtually share historic objects and photographs as a springboard to a lively discussion of how to better understand the present. Audience questions are encouraged and will be addressed during the moderated dialogue. Information on upcoming programs as well as links to recording of previous sessions are available.

Immigrants in COVID America

Immigrants in COVID America, a project from the University of Minnesota’s Immigration History Research Center, documents the first six-month period of the pandemic in the U.S. – beginning with the January 30, 2020 World Health Organization declaration that the coronavirus outbreak was an international emergency – and focuses on four issues that have particularly affected immigrants, refugees, and asylees during the pandemic: immigration policy, health, labor & the economy, and anti-Asian xenophobia.

The project highlights fact-based research and reporting from reputable national media sources and think tanks supplemented by ethnic and local media. It also includes perspectives from experts, scholars, and political commentators and provide a summary analysis of emerging trends and issues. A variety of methods are used to identify sources, including Google news alerts and immigration-related newsletters and digests, such as Migratory Notes and ImmigrationProfBlog. Diverse perspectives and opinions – political and otherwise – are included whenever possible, especially when they highlight the trajectory behind certain policies and the experiences of immigrants and refugees themselves.

It also includes Stories from the Pandemic, a collaboration with the Sahan Journal (a nonprofit digital newsroom dedicated to providing authentic news reporting for and about immigrants and refugees in Minnesota) to create digital stories documenting the experiences of immigrants and refugees during the pandemic.