Courses in the Archives and Public History MA program provide students with opportunities for deep reading and analysis alongside hands-on project work. The projects highlighted here represent the kinds of public-facing work accomplished by students in recent semesters.
An Audio Guide to Biloxi, Mississippi’s 1960 Wade-In
Ula Kulpa (HIST-GA 1752 Local and Community History)
On April 24, 1960, a group of Black residents of Biloxi, Mississippi, took to their local beach to protest the segregation of their hometown. They called it a wade-in. Two days later, The New York Times called it “the worst racial riot in Mississippi history.” This project is an audio guide to the wade-in in the form of a narrative podcast. It uses excerpts from oral history interviews with the organizer, Dr. Gilbert R. Mason, and a number of participants to reconstruct and reflect on the protest, and to educate visitors to Biloxi Beach about its role as an essential site in the ongoing struggle for racial equality in Mississippi.
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Walking Tour of the Puerto Rican Loisaida
Emily Teller (HIST-GA 1752 Local and Community History)
This walking tour, mapped out by Google Maps, explores Loisaida’s rich history and evolution in the face of gentrification and erasure, while highlighting a theme of resilience and resistance. It focuses on emphasizing Loisaida as an ideology, a people, and a place and space exists today because of community efforts to keep it alive. Despite losses over time, exemplified by the fading La Lucha Continua murals, landmarks like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and Casa Adela’s attest to the community’s defiance against yielding to developers and gentrifiers who seek to reshape the urban landscape. The ongoing battle for the CHARAS-El Bohio Community Center spotlights residents’ determination to revive crucial institutions. Lastly, Tompkins Square Park echoes a history of community empowerment, which is perfectly juxtaposed with its encirclement by buildings that showcase gentrification and the tides of change.
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Cypress Hills Cemetery Walking Tour
Alyssa Moore (HIST-GA 1752 Local and Community History)
This self-guided walking tour utilizes the digital application tool PocketSights to delve into the historical, cultural, social, and economic aspects of New York’s Black communities through the lens of Cypress Hills Cemetery. It aims to provide a nuanced understanding of their evolution and significance in the context of New York City through the detailed exploration of five individuals who are interred here. Each individual’s biography includes anecdotes, stories, and historical details that are contextualized with primary sources and informed by secondary source research, which are cited at the bottom of each page for the opportunity for further reading. Temporally, the individual narratives bob and weave in and out of each other, at times dovetailing with or disrupting one another. The tour aims to guide you, the user, so that you may begin weaving the beginnings of a tapestry of the experiences of this community. The history of Black communities in New York City is long, complex, and diverse. This tour extrapolates on the stories of individuals buried at Cypress Hills Cemetery to demonstrate the ways the city’s Black communities resisted structural racism and prejudice over time. That history is not a steady line of inevitable progress moving ever forward, and is borne out in the quiet corners of the lives of the real, everyday people who reside here.
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NYC Chinatown Restaurants – An All Day Cuisine Experience
Daniella Occhineri (HIST-GA 1752 Local and Community History)
NYC Chinatown Restaurants is a Google Maps tour designed to expose visitors to Chinatown’s rich history and food scene through the evolution of Chinese restaurants. By the late 1880s, Chinatown became home to the City’s earliest Chinese restaurants. Many of these were traditional tea houses and rice shops that mostly catered to immigrant tastes. However, a new type of cuisine was beginning to emerge as Chinese restaurant owners sought to expand their businesses to non-Chinese alike. By the 1920s, Chinatown had a bustling restaurant industry with dishes such as chop suey, egg foo young, and chow mein. The restaurant industry and Chinese-American cuisine would continue to evolve following the end of Chinese Exclusion and the introduction of new migrant groups beginning in 1965 from regions such as Hong Kong, Guangdong, and Fuzhou. The tour consists of different restaurants, each emblematic of different periods in Chinese American history and migratory waves. Thus, visitors will be encouraged to not only see restaurants as eating establishments, but as spaces of history, community, and cultural exchange. Sites include Nom Wah Tea Parlor (the oldest running restaurant in Chinatown), Hop Lee (an infamous chop suey restaurant), Yung Sun Seafood (Fuzhou-American cuisine), and Mango Mango (a Hong Kong inspired dessert shop founded in Chinatown). Each restaurant’s menu correlates to a breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert schedule, meaning tourists can explore the rest of what Chinatown has to offer in between meals.
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The Science Education of American Girls
Mercedes Rodrigues Lima and Elizabeth Rodriguez Estrada (HIST-GA 2033 Creating Digital History)
Have you ever wondered why there are more men than women in STEM careers? Dive into the development of the science education received by American girls throughout U.S. history. Chronologically explore the different factors that have conditioned the possibilities of women’s involvement in science today. By analyzing three channels of sources (educational, popular culture, and career-related) from the 19th century to the present, explore the multiple factors that might explain the gender disparity in science today.
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The Second Amendment, the Black Panthers, and Anti-Blackness in America
Gracia Brown, Allegra Favila, and Ephraim Kozodoy (HIST-GA 2033 Creating Digital History)
The Black Panther Party’s mobilization of their Second Amendment rights, and the ensuing legal denial of those rights, form a seminal example in the long history of anti-Black U.S. gun legislation rooted in white fear of Black armed resistance. This interactive StoryMap demonstrates how white Americans’ fear of Black armed resistance outlasted the institution of slavery, led Ronald Reagan to sign gun control legislation intended to disarm the Black Panthers, and is made manifest to this day when Black Americans are murdered by police for exercising their Second Amendment rights.